Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution - 1863-1877

rdf:langString Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution - 1863-1877

rdf:langString Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

rdf:langString Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

rdf:langString Non-Fiction

rdf:langString The First Vote drawn by A.R. Waud. Engraving published in Harper's Weekly, vol. 11, no. 568 , Special Collections, Library of Virginia

rdf:langString English

rdf:langString hardcover, paperback, e-book, audiobook

rdf:langString The Reconstruction Era

rdf:langString Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 is a historical non-fiction monograph written by American Historian Eric Foner. Its broad focus is the Reconstruction Era in the aftermath of the American Civil War, which consists of the social, political, economic, and cultural changes brought about as consequences of the war's outcome. The author addresses, criticizes, and integrates several historical perspectives of the Civil War that first appeared during Reconstruction, such as the reconciliationist, white supremacist, and abolitionist perspectives, into a single cohesive academic narrative based on primary sources, such as newspaper quotations and interviews with Americans who lived through the era, as well as secondary sources, such as other texts written on the subject. The author divides the primary topic of the Reconstruction Era into several subcategories, addressing them individually throughout the text while also integrating them into a larger context. Such subtopics addressed by the book include the gradual abolition of race-based chattel slavery, the gradual emancipation of the previously enslaved, the Reconstruction Amendments, the integration of the previously enslaved into the post-war society, the continuation of Manifest Destiny, the development of new White Supremacist ideologies and groups in both the North and the South, racist pogroms and massacres carried out against the freedmen by former confederates, police, state officials, and vigilantes, the relationship of the newly freedmen to the previously free men, the relationship of freedmen to their former masters, the ascendancy of America's industrial bourgeoisie after emancipation, the dissolution of the wealth and power of the semi-feudal Southern slave aristocracy, the re-integration of Confederate states into the Union, the erection of legal frameworks to elaborate upon and reinforce emancipation, such as the Freedmen's Bureau, the development of systems of education for freed slaves, black male suffrage, the reuniting of African American families separated by slavery, the relationship of newly freed African Americans to the political economy, the appearance of state-sanctioned segregation, regional differences in how Reconstruction was handled, and attempts by freedmen to achieve subsistence and political independence outside the dual frameworks of Northern paternalism and Southern attempts to restore the old order.