Black Reconstruction in America (selections)

TL;DR — Du Bois’s 1935 history that overturned the scholarly consensus on Reconstruction — and was ignored for thirty years.

Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Full title: Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Professor of Sociology at Atlanta University.

Du Bois argued that Reconstruction was a genuine democratic experiment destroyed by force, that freedmen were its agents rather than its objects, and that the dominant Dunning School account was propaganda. He included a chapter, The Propaganda of History, on how the historical profession had produced it.

He was right, and it took the discipline roughly thirty years to say so. One of the strongest cases in American historiography of a correct book being ignored because of who wrote it.

Where this came from

• Brendan Sheehan’s public are.na channel

57 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.