forever free the story of emancipation and reconstruction

He refutes lingering misconceptions about Reconstruction, including the attribution of its ills to corrupt African American politicians and 'carpetbaggers,' and connects it to the movements for civil rights and racial justice. In Forever Free, Eric Foner, the leading historian of America's Reconstruction era, reexamines one of the most misunderstood periods of American history: the struggle to overthrow slavery and establish freedom for African Americans in the years before, during, and after the Civil War. He shows us that the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and renewed acts of racial violence were retaliation for the progress made by blacks soon after the war. Foner makes clear how, by war's end, freed slaves in the South built on networks of church and family in order to exercise their right of suffrage as well as gain access to education, land, and employment. Neely, Jr. We see African Americans as active agents in overthrowing slavery, in helping win the Civil War, and-even more actively-in shaping Reconstruction and creating a legacy long obscured and misunderstood. Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (2006) Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001) Mary E. Forever Free should be required reading for all history students, high school students, and teachers who continue to propagate the incorrect story of Reconstruction. ALSO BY THE AUTHORS BY ERIC FONBR Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Alen: The Ideology of the Republican. From one of our most distinguished historians, a new examination of the vitally important years of Emancipation and Reconstruction during and immediately following the Civil War-a necessary reconsideration that emphasizes the era’s political and cultural meaning for today's America.ĭrawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, Eric Foner places a new emphasis on the centrality of the black experience to an understanding of the era. The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction Eric Foner.

Forever free the story of emancipation and reconstruction