Customer Reviews

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New American Nation Series)

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I was led to this book by a persistent layman's desire to understand what exactly happened after the Civil War and why Reconstruction so notoriously "failed." This monumental book was so much more than I bargained for. It is not only a study of the post-War South, but also of the forces unleashed during the War itself, of the post-War North, of the growing frontier West and, most importantly, of the modernizing forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, the growth of Northern capitalism and the national state required to direct it. Though distinctly Marxist in his approach, Foner never falls prey to the rhetoric, reductionism or false inevitability that mars so much Marxist historiography. This book is instead full of the interplay of flawed humans, honest and corrupt, and of societal forces, moderning and reactionary, that dueled so fiercely for control of the post-War nation. The completeness of the research leads to a sure-handed analysis that seems to leave nothing unexamined. I can see why this book won the Parkman Prize in 1988.