Ezra's Bookshelf

Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

by W. E. B. Du Bois · 772 pages · ~14 hrs

HistoryRace & Identity

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W.E.B. Du Bois published this revisionist history in 1935, challenging the racist consensus that dominated scholarly and popular understanding of Reconstruction. Where white historians portrayed the period as a disaster caused by Black incompetence and Northern corruption, Du Bois argued that freedpeople were the central actors in a democratic revolution betrayed by Northern capital's accommodation with Southern planters. The book was largely ignored for decades before the Civil Rights movement forced a reconsideration of its arguments. Du Bois, trained as a historian at Harvard under the German school before becoming the preeminent Black intellectual of his era, brings massive erudition to bear on what he calls the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions. He examines how enslaved people effectively conducted a general strike during the Civil War, withholding their labor from the Confederacy and providing intelligence and support to Union forces. Their actions transformed a war to preserve the Union into a war against slavery. Du Bois details the achievements of Reconstruction governments, the public schools and hospitals and democratic reforms that Black political participation made possible. He connects the overthrow of Reconstruction to the triumph of industrial capitalism, arguing that Northern businessmen preferred stability and cheap labor to justice for the freedpeople. The book combines rigorous scholarship with passionate advocacy, insisting that history serves liberation. It remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand America's long struggle with race and democracy.

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