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

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

First edition.

0375402594 (alk. paper)

New York : Knopf, 2005.

English

xxx, 268 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm

9780375402593

E668 .F655 2005

973.8

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.

"Forever Free project : Stephen B. Brier, Peter O. Almond, executive editors/producers ; Christine Doudna, editor."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-244) and index.

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