Reconstruction

America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

De: Eric Foner

Narrado por: Norman Dietz

The period following the Civil War was one of the most controversial eras in American history. This comprehensive account of the period captures the drama of those turbulent years that played such an important role in shaping modern America.

Eric Foner brilliantly chronicles how Americans, Black and White, responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the Civil War and the end of slavery. He provides fresh insights on a host of other issues, including the ways in which the emancipated slave's quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; Abraham Lincoln's attitude toward Reconstruction; the role of "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags"; and the role of violence in the period.

This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period, an era whose legacy reverberates in the United States to this day.

©1988 Eric Foner (P)1990 Blackstone Audio

Informative!

The Reconstruction book provided me with the America history lesson that should have been taught in school. This book in an Informative and necessary read.

Excellent history that High School failed to teach

Realized that I didn't learn much about reconstruction in High School beyond carpet baggers & scalawags. Foner does a great job cover the whole of reconstruction & it's ultimate failure to extend universal suffrage to the new freedmen.

An Amazing History

This book puts togather the historical context that has founds the last 150 years of american history. A must listen for those interested in sociatal structures and black rights

required reading for any American

This is an extremely important book. the narrator is a bit much at times, but you will learn to understand America much better by reading this book.

The doctrine of unintended consequences writ large

Broad, through treatment of the complex political and social upheaval that continues to affect us today.

Detailed and comprehensive!

I really enjoyed reading this book after my studies of the civil war. It has inspired me to research other areas including the redemption of the south and the establishment of civil war monuments. Racism continues to be a significant challenge in understanding our history and how we can move forward. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand our current political climate

Eye-opening

Foner’s account of Reconstruction is a detailed analysis of events beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and ending with the election of James Garfield in 1876. It’s full of surprises, especially for someone like me who grew up in the South with tales of vicious carpetbaggers and scalawags and black-majority legislatures that resembled minstrel shows. Simply put, we were lied to.

As Foner makes clear, slaves in the South did what they could to assume control of their own lives even before the Union armies gave them a place of refuge. The Reconstruction legislatures that rewrote state constitutions were, even when dominated by newly enfranchised blacks, conventional bodies that engaged in dignified, serious debate. (Anyone who doubts this should spend some time reading transcripts of the 1868 South Carolina constitutional debates.) Their goals included black suffrage, hospitals for all, universal access to public facilities and the courts, and universal public education. For that, the leaders were defamed, terrorized, and sometimes murdered.

The scale of white Southern violence against freed slaves was appalling. In one incident, white supremacists broke through windows of a building where black leaders were meeting and opened fire, killing dozens. In another, a small town was decimated and its leaders hung from nearby trees. Women were raped, men were castrated, babies had their brains dashed out on rocks. The Klan began its murderous campaign against black voting rights during this period.

It was a situation that required military intervention, and at first the North supplied this. But it took only a few years for Unionists to lose interest and for the white supremacists in the Democratic Party to gain control of Congress. After the three “Reconstruction amendments” were passed and ratified, even William Lloyd Garrison believed the job was done. The troops were withdrawn, the state constitutions were rewritten to give power back to the plantation owners, and the black codes, which had held sway briefly in 1865 before Congress took over the process, were reinstated in even harsher forms.

The problem was not that Reconstruction was ill-advised. The problem was that it wasn't given a chance to work. At one time I would have said it took another hundred years to complete the job, but it's become clear in recent years that after 150 years the job is still not done. Blacks in America remain disadvantaged, ghettoized, incarcerated, and murdered at shocking rates.

Norman Dietz hasn't gotten a fair shake for his excellent job narrating this audiobook. As one example, he's been criticized for pronouncing “hegemony” with a hard G; but according to Merriam Webster, this is one of the acceptable pronunciations (although it is more typically British). In any case, his occasional mispronunciations have been exaggerated. He is an engaging narrator and is able to keep a good pace through the mass of details.

The audiobook has also been unfairly criticized for not being the most recent edition of the book, the 2014 reissue. But as with many such “revisions,” the new material consists of an additional chapter and bibliography surveying the research done since 1988, when the book first appeared. The bulk of the book remains the same as in the first edition.

A frequently misunderstood period of history

This is a lengthy book--sometimes tough with audiobooks. But the narrator does a good job and the subject is thoughtfully and thoroughly examined.

Read for Understanding the Past & Present

Many people have criticized the performance/ that this is a recording from 1990 of the OG text, which has been updated, I’m not gonna focus on that. If you can’t read the updates text, it’s still worth it to read this if you care about understanding American social/cultural and political history, and if you want to better understand the present.

This book will help you understand the context of how we’ve had the kind of racial injustices in this country, at least how emancipation ultimately still failed black Americans, and that’s largely because of the failure of Reconstruction, arguably more than anything else. It will help you understand that the failure of Reconstruction was not just a function of white supremacy, but also was something rooted in the political economy of the time, namely the changes taking place because of the greatly expanding Industrial Revolution, and the fact that the capitalist system was deepening its hold on the lives of all Americans. This context unfortunately had devastating consequences for Reconstruction, and once the country entered into the worst economic depression it had ever experienced (called “the Great Depression”, until the depression of the 1930s took that namesake) starting in 1873, the fate of Reconstruction was all but sealed, and white supremacy was practically guaranteed to re-emerge victorious… Particularly when massive strike waves (that in many cases saw white and black workers unite in shared struggle) ultimately caused the complete withdrawal of the military from southern posts, where they had defended Republican governments, and fought the KKK, marking the final blow to protecting the fragile state of Reconstruction in 1877..

This isn’t to say racism/white supremacy didn’t play a major role alongside the material economic realities of the time, bc it absolutely did. The book will help you understand that the first real massive blow to Reconstruction was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, leading to the presidency of perhaps the most vile racist who ever held the office (that’s saying something!), Andrew Johnson. Johnson’s resentment and hatred of black folk really can’t be understated, and the book does a great job at going in depth as to how he sabotaged the era of “Presidential Reconstruction”, and pretty much made everyone hate him in the process, very nearly leading to his removal from office (political economic factors largely explain the only reason he’s not the only president to be removed through impeachment). You’ll also learn ways racism factored into the failure, bc of the ideological stranglehold it had on many white workers, blinding them of the reality that they shared interest in working with black workers, particularly in radical unions, and to the fact that not working together would lead to worse lives for them as well, even if they did live marginally better than the black worker… I should also add, however, you’ll see that even amongst the black folks, class divisions played a major role, and while their numbers where substantially fewer, the upper class and “bourgeois” black folks interests often aligned more based on economic concerns for them, not so much the racial justice concerns of the overwhelming majority of black freedmen, and I think this too is a major takeaway, even if not a prominent part of the text.

For me at least, these kinds of lessons from the book are not only important for learning how the past created the conditions that lead to the present, but also for understanding what we in the present might want to consider for our own battles for justice. Particularly, I think something revealed in this history is the relationship between race and class, how the material reality of economics and politics plays into the fight for racial justice and class/economic justice, and the fact that these things cannot be so easily separated (and we divide the fight for these things at the peril of both). This book is only one of many in which it is revealed to us that working class struggles in America where workers are divided by racial lines, only leads to the failure of those struggles to produce substantial progress, let alone justice. Where Reconstruction was most successful, white folks worked with black folks, and where it failed most miserably, white folks were divided by fear and bigotry, and failed to unite with black folks, which lead to the racial and economic destitution of black folk, while still also contributing to economic destitution for the working class industrial or farming white folks… I think it’s very clear that this phenomenon can be seen in the history *before* Reconstruction, and in many places thereafter, and that this MUST be a guiding data point for organizers and activists working today for racial and economic justice. That’s just history, not my own opinion…

For my opinion: ONLY united as both one human race, across racial divisions, as anti-racist, and anti-capitalist, is there much hope of ever Reconstructing this planet in a way where racial justice and economic justice is not only improved, but actually WON… and only then can the history of the human race enter a period that can get us to the imagined futures of Star Trek, or other “techno utopian” kinds of paradise.. BUT.. that’s getting a way from the point of this book and this review. Cheers.

Great history book but narrator was very poor.

This is a fine book, extremely detailed, with a vast amount of information that should be disseminated more widely but the narrator mispronounced so many words it was distracting.