General Readings on Slavery, Emancipation, and its Aftermath

Books:

Anderson, Eric and Alfred A. Moss, Jr, eds. Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.

Berlin, Ira and Phillip Morgan, eds. Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the America. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1993.

Brown, Thomas J., ed. Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008.

Camejo, Peter. Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877. Atlanta, Georgia: Pathfinder Press, 1976 (2008).

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York, New York: Free Press, 1999. 

Edwards, Laura F. Gendered Strife and Confusion: the Political Culture of Reconstruction. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 

Fitzgerald, Michael W. The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change during Reconstruction. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.  New York, New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2002. 

_____. Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1983 (2007). 

Frey, Silvia and Betty Woods, eds. From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World. London, England: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999.

Genovese, Eugene. Roll Jordan Roll: the World the Slaves Made. New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1976.

Gillette, William. Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2005.

_____. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Litwack, Leon. Been in the Storm So Long: the Aftermath of Slavery. New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1980. 

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. "Has 'Minority History' Transformed the Historical Discourse?" Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 35:8 (Nov. 1997).

Miller, Steven et al. "Between Emancipation and Enfranchisement: Law and the Political Mobilization of Black Southerners, 1865-1867," Chicago-Kent Law Review 70: 3 (1995): 1059-77.

Novick, Peter. "Divergence and Dissent," in That Noble Dream: the 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession, 206-249.

Oakes, James. "The Political Significance of Slave Resistance," History Workshop, 22 (Autumn, 1986): 89-107.

Robinson, Armstead L. "Beyond the Realm of Social Consensus: New Meanings of Reconstruction for American History," Journal of American History 68:2 (Sept. 1981): 276-97.

_____. "The Difference Freedom Made: the Emancipation of Afro-Americans," with comments from Eric Foner and Nell Painter, in Darlene Clark Hine, ed. The State of Afro-American History,51-88.

Mohr, Clarence. On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Montgomery, David. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

O'Donovan, Susan E. Becoming Free in the Cotton South. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007. 

Olsen, Otto, ed. Reconstruction and Redemption in the South. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Perman, Michael. Reunion without Compromise: the South & Reconstruction, 1865-1868. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Rabinowitz, Howard N. Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Richardson, Heather Cox. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004.

____. West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008.

Rodrigue, John C. Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862-1880. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: the Port Royal Experiment. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1999.

Saville, Julie. The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Shachtman, Max. Race and Revolution: a Lost Chapter in American Radicalism, Christopher Phelps, ed. London and New York: Verso, 2003.

Singletary, Otis. Negro Militia and Reconstruction. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1957.

Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: the Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Reconstruction. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1979.

Tunnell, Ted. Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Woodward, C. Vann. Reunion and Reaction; the Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1991.

Articles:

Barkley Brown, Elsa. "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture (Fall 1994), 107-46.

Berlin, Ira. "Who Freed the Slaves? Emancipation and Its Meaning," in David W. Blight and Brooks D. Simpson, eds. Union & Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era,105-122. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997.

_____. "Writing Freedom's History: The Destruction of Slavery," Prologue 17:4 (Winter1985): 211-27.

Callinicos, Alex. "Marxism and the Crisis in Social History," in John Rees, ed. Essays on Historical Materialism. London, England: Bookmarks, 1998.

Dunning, William A. “The Undoing of Reconstruction,” in Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (New York, New York: Macmillan, 1904), 353-385.

Genovese, Eugene and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. "The Political Crisis of Social History: Class Struggle as Subject and Object," in Fruits of Merchant Capital, 179-212. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1983.

Johnson, Walter. "On Agency," Journal of Social History 37 (Fall 2003): 113-124.