I’m on page 60 and am having a hard time getting thru it.
Are there any alternatives that might be more readable?
The Foner book does seem to be well thought of…agree/disagree?
I found it hard going too, and I still haven’t finished it.
Foner’s book is indeed well regarded, and has been considered the definitive scholarly account of Reconstruction, as a whole, for the past 20 years.
But, it is certainly not an easy read. It wanders from the main story for lengthy and sometimes turgid analysis. Foner himself recognized the problem, and published an abbreviated version called A Short History of Reconstruction. I haven’t read it (having read the long version), and so can’t say whether it is better.
I can’t recommend an alternative, because there isn’t one. The world badly needs a new narrative history of Reconstruction. It’s a poorly understood period in American history, and the fact that nobody has written a good, accessible narrative since the Civil Rights Movement is I believe part of the reason.
I didn’t find it to be that bad. I woud recommend sticking with it, as Foner gives much great information about the Reconstruction and why it went wrong
I quite like Foner’s shorter version, but i really think that the full version is worth the effort. Yes, it’s big, and it’s sometimes slow going, but it also does justice to many of the immense complexities of Reconstruction in a way that the shorter narrative just can’t manage.
Despite the fact that it’s about 80 years old, and thus has a rather different historical methodology and approach, i think W.E.B. Du Bois’s work Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 is also essential reading on the subject.
For different perspectives, I’ve gotten recommendations for books by Randall/Donald and Coulter… comments??
Ellis Merton Coulter? Well, yes - he would give a rather different perspective ;). Foner mentions him in his introduction, quoting Coulter as saying that the fact blacks took part in government during Reconstruction was “to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.”
I haven’t read the Randall/Donald book, but it appears that it is much wider in scope than Foner’s, extending to 20 years prior to the Civil War.
Yeah, i’d probably give Coulter a miss, except as an exemplar of Southern white apologist history in the mid 20th century.
Another reason why Foner’s big book is so good is that it has tons of footnotes, many of them containing historiographical discussion, and those footnotes are also printed page-by-page (rather than stuck at the back of the book, as endnotes) so you can really get a sense, as you read along, of where he’s getting his information, how he approaches his sources, and what arguments he does and does not find compelling.
Read his book, and you’ll probably get a pretty good idea of what some other useful books might be.
C. Vann Woodward is also very good.
Michael Les Benedict’s books are almost 40 years old, but he is very good on the national politics of the period. His Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson is short, readable, and has a lot of good insights on the 1865-68 period. Allan Trelease’s White Terror is still the best book on the horrific Klan violence of 1868-71, which came near to overthrowing Reconstruction as soon as it began. However it is more stomach-turning detail than most people would want.
There have been a couple of good state studies in recent years, showing how violence succeeded later in the 1870’s where the Klan had failed. We have The Day Freedom Died on the Colfax massacre (Louisiana), and Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War on Mississippi in 1875.
For an older series of short and readable state studies, there is Reconstruction and Redemption in the South edited by Otto Olsen, although it only covers six of the 11 states. On the social and economic side we have The Origins of Southern Sharecropping by Edward Royce.
Missing, IMO, is a good narrative which would tie it all together.