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W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction

An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 More

Edited by Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews “Jim Crow Was a Cash Grab”: Tyina L. Steptoe on the Harrowing History of the American Color Line
July 10, 2024

Interviews The Wounded World: Chad L. Williams on a lost masterwork by W.E.B. Du Bois
April 20, 2023

Story of the Week Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction”
February 25, 2022

Save $30 when you buy both Du Bois volumes.

Upon its publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction offered a radical new assessment of the post–Civil War era, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and, ultimately, the unjust social order of Jim Crow. Previously cast as a misguided, even villainous effort to impose an inverted and “unnatural” racial hierarchy on the defeated South, Reconstruction was for Du Bois nothing less than a milestone in the course of human history, “the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen.”

Du Bois identified the problem in the work of the dominant historians of his day: “the chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself, has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected.” In setting the record straight, Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called an “indispensable book . . . one of the landmarks of U.S. historical scholarship.”

A sweeping, magisterial work of rigorous analysis written with precision and powerful eloquence, Black Reconstruction restores slavery to the core of American history, emphasizing its crucial importance to the nation as a whole and exposing the underlying economic engines of the Civil War and its aftermath. It makes clear that the formerly enslaved, as they claimed first their freedom and then their citizenship, were pivotal actors in this second American revolution, as soldiers and emancipators, workers and legislators.

Presented here in an authoritative, annotated edition, Black Reconstruction is joined for the first time with important writings that trace the evolution of Du Bois’s thinking about Reconstruction and its centrality in understanding the embattled course of democracy in America.

Eric Foner is the author of many award-winning books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, including The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. He is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, and has produced, written, and hosted an array of documentary films for public television, including Finding Your Roots and The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction is kept in print by gifts to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from The Berkley Family Foundation Foundation and from Elizabeth W. Smith. They also provided project support for the volume.
News & Views

Interviews “Jim Crow Was a Cash Grab”: Tyina L. Steptoe on the Harrowing History of the American Color Line
July 10, 2024

Interviews The Wounded World: Chad L. Williams on a lost masterwork by W.E.B. Du Bois
April 20, 2023

Story of the Week Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction”
February 25, 2022

Story of the Week W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Experts”
January 21, 2022

Video How W.E.B. Du Bois restored Black eyewitness accounts to the history of Reconstruction
November 30, 2021
Table of Contents

BLACK RECONSTRUCTION: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880
To the Reader
I. The Black Worker
II. The White Worker
III. The Planter
IV. The General Strike
V. The Coming of the Lord
VI. Looking Backward
VII. Looking Forward
VIII. Transubstantiation of a Poor White
IX. The Price of Disaster
X. The Black Proletariat in South Carolina
XI. The Black Proletariat in Mississippi and Louisiana
XII. The White Proletariat in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida
XIII. The Duel for Labor Control on Border and Frontier
XIV. Counter-Revolution of Property
XV. Founding the Public School
XVI. Back Toward Slavery
XVII. The Propaganda of History
Bibliography

OTHER WRITINGS
Of the Dawn of Freedom (1901/1903)
Reconstruction and Its Benefits (1910)
The Experts (1913)
The Reconstruction of Freedom (1924)

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-703-1 1097 pages

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N° 350 Library of America Series

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