Top Ten Books on the History of Reconstruction

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.New York: Free Press, 2000.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper, 1988.

Harding, Vincent. There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1981.

Holt, Thomas. Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Civil War. New York: Russell and Russell, 1953.

Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet (2003)

Heather C. Richardson (The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North published in 2001 and West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War

Gregory P. Downs’ After Appomattox

“Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen” (Mariner, 2010)

Michael W. Fitzgerald’s “Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South” (Ivan R. Dee, 2007)

“The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction” (Louisiana State University, 2003)