A definitive edition of the landmark book that forever changed our
understanding of the Civil War's aftermath and the legacy of racism
in America
Upon publication in
1935, W.E.B. Du Bois's now classic Black Reconstruction
offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction--and of
American democracy itself. One of the towering African American
thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all
his intellectual powers to bear on the nation's post-Civil War era of
political reorganization, a time when African American progress was
met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the
consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow.
Black
Reconstruction is a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship
that, in the wake of the censorship of Du Bois's characterization of
Reconstruction by the Encyclopedia Britannica, was written to debunk
influential historians whose racist ideas and emphases had disfigured
the historical record. "The chief witness in Reconstruction, the
emancipated slave himself," Du Bois argued, "has been
almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been
largely destroyed and nearly always neglected." In setting the
record straight Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called
an "indispensable book," a magisterial work of detached
scholarship that is also imbued with passionate outrage.
Presented in a
handsome and authoritative hardcover edition prepared by Foner and
co-editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black Reconstruction is
joined here for the first time with important writings that trace Du
Bois's thinking throughout his career about Reconstruction and its
centrality in understanding the tortured course of democracy in
America.