Thursday, March 3, 2016


Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877   Eric Foner
Extremely-detailed, scholarly, highly-intelligent history of the attempts to reconstruct the defeated confederacy as part of the greater United States and create a new social order with Negro equality in the conquered states. The failure to do so, caused by racism, in the north as well as the south, incompetence, greed, political infighting, and economic depression, spawned the deeply depressing and revolting institutionalization of illegitimate white supremacy that lasted a century. Very good, essential but depressing read.

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