Recommended Resources
Reconstruction
The books, articles, films, and websites in this section will enhance the materials included on our website for this era of American history. Many of the books are by the historians whose essays and lectures you have read and listened to here and offer in-depth studies of the topics that have caught your interest. The websites and other resources open new ways to explore American history and take advantage of new interpretations and new technologies to enhance classroom or at-home learning.
Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.
Foner, Eric, and Olivia Mahoney. America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
Rable, George C. But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984.
Richards, David A. Conscience and the Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of the Reconstruction Amendments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Foner, Eric. Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
McPherson, James M. Into the West: From Reconstruction to the Final Days of the American Frontier. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006.
Foner, Eric. Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
Quigley, David. Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.
Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.
Benedict, Michael Les. The Fruits of Victory: Alternatives in Restoring the Union, 1865–1877. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 1975.
The Reconstruction Amendments’ Debates: The Legislative History and Contemporary Debates in Congress on the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Compiled by Alfred Avins. Richmond: Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, 1967.
Recommended Resources from Other Sub-Eras
Penney, Sherry H., James D. Livingston. A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Women’s Rights. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
Cherny, Robert W. American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868–1900. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1997.
McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Kessner, Thomas. Capital City: New York City and the Men behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Rable, George C. Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Bain, David Haward. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Viking Press, 1999.
Dubois, Ellen C. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Robinet, Harriet Gillem. Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1998.
Rable, George C. God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Stiles, T. J. Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2002.
Sandweiss, Martha A. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Chafe, William H., Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad, et al., eds. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South. New York: New Press, 2001.
Patterson, Marie. Slavery in America: Expanding and Preserving the Union, Primary Source Readers. Huntington Beach, CA: Teacher Created Resources, 1991.
Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Montoya, Maria E. Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840 to 1920. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.
Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven: Yale University, 1990.