From the first sentence to the final paragraph, this book is a forceful, authoritative and masterful history of Black Reconstruction. It is the author's masterpiece. Every undergrad in history should read it; every grad student should read it and write about it. It is indispensable to an understanding of U.S. history. ( )

Reading up on impeachment, I found W.E.B. Du Bois' analysis of Andrew Johnson, a demagogue who railed against the elite, yet as president became a tool of privilege. Sounds familiar. Du Bois shares the 1619 Project view of blacks as the central American story, and presents a detailed and stirring account of the great unresolved issues of the Civil War. Poor whites identified with oligarchs and industry aligned with cheap labor. The U.S., he writes, "fought slavery to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery."

This is a monumental work of research, meant to counter the white narratives of reconstruction as being a failure due to the ignorance and laziness of recently emancipated blacks. Additionally, DuBois shows how slaves fled their masters' plantations to join the Union army and, by doing so, created the incentive for Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, winning the Civil War for the north. Interestingly, DuBois labels this as a "general strike," an anarcho-syndicalist term that you'd think he would avoid due to being a classical Marxist.

Some of the ideas about the white proletariat, in both the northern and southern context, is super helpful in thinking about the roots of racist reaction in the united states. That topic is the main reason I read this, and I'm glad I did. That being said, the book is tedious. There is so much detail, I honestly can say I don't know the rough timeline of reconstruction because he spent so little time giving overall descriptions. Obviously he's not to blame for this, his task at the time was to counter the narratives about Reconstruction, and he obviously succeeded at that. But I find myself wanting to read another book on reconstruction that is shorter, and gives me a better guideline and timeline of what happened and when.

Another issue, which the authors of [b:Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South|23282211|Dixie Be Damned 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South|Neal Shirley|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1428630790s/23282211.jpg|42820046] describe superbly, is that DuBois is trying to prove that recently free blacks wanted to become wage laborers. This way of thinking is based on Marx's analysis of history, which actually compliments capitalism for bringing workers together, before taking over the society and making it communist. I'm sure some of the folks back then wanted that, but many probably just wanted to live without the forced labor of the capitalist market, a sin that seems unthinkable in the 1930s when USSR-inspired Communism (big-C) dominated anti-capitalist thought in the US. I'm very interested in the Quilombos, maroon societies, and examples of ex-slaves trying to make their way outside of the capitalist market. Unfortunately those societies are probably difficult to document and thus for us to read about now.

This was a good read, I'm glad I read it, but it's a commitment. ( )

Arguably one of the best books ever written on the subject of Reconstruction. W.E.B. Du Bois offers an effective retort against the racist historiography of the Dunning School by offering his own historical and economic analysis. He argues that white supremacy undermined the liberating project of Reconstruction in the American South. Essentially, corrupt White supremacist politicians and organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan eroded the freedoms of Black folks through terrorist violence and Jim Crow Laws. In addition, they also created more tension between black and white members of the working class, thus eliminating any possibility of multiracial class solidarity. It is a lengthy book on an equally long subject.

If you are a scholar of the American South, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, you have to get this book. ( )