This fall I’ll be taking a class on the reconstruction era and I thought maybe I’d read a book or two this summer to prime myself. Does anyone have suggestions on good books on this subject? thanks.
The book on the subject is Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, by Eric Foner.
If that’s too much, he also did A Short History of Reconstruction. Both are available for cheap at Amazon.
They are from 1988 and 1990 and there have probably been new books on the subject every other week since. Including his own Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, which came out last year but I haven’t read yet. I would still start with Foner’s Reconstruction…
For a short and sprightly read, try The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson by Michael Les Benedict. As the title implies, it deals mostly with politics and not social history, but it does touch on social matters in explaining the conflict between Andrew Johnson and the Republicans in Congress, and makes the politics of the period a lot more comprehensible.
An interesting recent book was Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann, about the armed overthrow of Adelbert Ames’ Reconstruction government in Mississippi.