Waubonsee Community College

Forever free, the story of emancipation and Reconstruction, Eric Foner ; illustrations edited and with commentary by Joshua Brown

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-244) and index

illustrationsportraits

index present

non fiction

Forever free

bibliography

57557510

Eric Foner ; illustrations edited and with commentary by Joshua Brown

the story of emancipation and Reconstruction

This new examination of the years of Emancipation and Reconstruction during and immediately following the Civil War emphasizes the era's political and cultural meaning for today's America. Historian Foner overturns numerous assumptions growing out of the traditional understanding of the period, which is based almost exclusively on white sources and shaped by (often unconscious) racism. He presents the period as a time of determination, especially on the part of recently emancipated black Americans, to put into effect the principles of equal rights and citizenship for all. He makes clear how, by war's end, freed slaves built on networks of church and family in order to exercise their right of suffrage as well as gain access to education, land, and employment, and shows that the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and renewed acts of racial violence were retaliation for the progress made by blacks soon after the war.--From publisher description

The peculiar institution -- True likenesses -- Forever free -- Re-visions of war -- The meanings of freedom -- Altered relations -- An American crisis -- The tocsin of freedom -- On the offensive -- The facts of reconstruction -- Countersigns -- The abandonment of reconstruction -- Jim Crow -- The unfinished revolution