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Forever free : the story of emancipation and Reconstruction / Eric Foner ; illustrations edited and with commentary by Joshua Brown.

by Foner, Eric, 1943-

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New York : Knopf, 2005.

Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877)

Enslaved persons -- Emancipation -- United States.

United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- African Americans.

United States -- Race relations -- History -- 19th century.

United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1900.

0375402594 (alk. paper) :

xxx, 268 p. : ill., ports. ; 24 cm.

The peculiar institution -- True likenesses -- Forever free -- Re-visions of war -- The meanings of freedom -- Altered relations -- An American crisis -- The tocsin of freedom -- On the offensive -- The facts of reconstruction -- Countersigns -- The abandonment of reconstruction -- Jim Crow -- The unfinished revolution.

This new examination of the years of Emancipation and Reconstruction during and immediately following the Civil War emphasizes the era's political and cultural meaning for today's America. Historian Foner overturns numerous assumptions growing out of the traditional understanding of the period, which is based almost exclusively on white sources and shaped by (often unconscious) racism. He presents the period as a time of determination, especially on the part of recently emancipated black Americans, to put into effect the principles of equal rights and citizenship for all. He makes clear how, by war's end, freed slaves 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, and shows 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.--From publisher description.

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