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This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people--an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.
Emphasizing the importance of kinship, labor, and networks of communication, A Nation under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows how they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration.
Heather C. Richardson, <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674013662/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0674013662&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=42b8f7c9536feb8a4c83bf4a16673c14 The Death of
Historians overwhelmingly have blamed the demise of Reconstruction on Southerners' persistent racism. Heather Cox Richardson argues instead that class, along with race, was critical to Reconstruction's end. Northern support for freed blacks and Reconstruction weakened in the wake of growing critiques of the economy and calls for a redistribution of wealth.
Using newspapers, public speeches, popular tracts, Congressional reports, and private correspondence, Richardson traces the changing Northern attitudes toward African-Americans from the Republicans' idealized image of black workers in 1861 through the 1901 publication of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery. She examines such issues as black suffrage, disenfranchisement, taxation, westward migration, lynching, and civil rights to detect the trajectory of Northern disenchantment with Reconstruction. She reveals a growing backlash from Northerners against those who believed that inequalities should be addressed through working-class action, and the emergence of an American middle class that championed individual productivity and saw African-Americans as a threat to their prosperity.
Heather C. Richardson, <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300110529/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0300110529&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=742a5ae07c542383f8263716c6ad2a43 West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War]</i> (Yale University Press, 2008)
