| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. By Richard M. Valelly. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xviii, 330 pp. Cloth, $58.00, ISBN 0-226-84528-1. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-226-84530-3.)
Richard M. Valelly uses Reconstruction and the modern civil rights movement as case studies to explore why the first epoch ended in disfranchisement while the second effort did not. Valelly poses questions that have long bedeviled students of politics. What is the relationship between social movements, political parties, and jurisprudence? Why have African Americans been perennially targeted for disfranchisement, and what does this process reveal about U.S. political development? How do grass-roots political coalitions translate their ideas into effective social change and lasting public policies?	1
The author weaves together an impressive range of literature on African American studies, rational-choice theory, political science, and legal history. This study is especially indebted to the new historical institutionalist scholarship. The author draws heavily on Stephen Skowronek and his conception of the United States as a "state of courts and parties" to argue that political parties and legal institutions, more than national values, economic factors, or foreign policy considerations have driven changes in race relations (Building a New American State, 1982). Valelly avoids the top-down tendencies of the institutionalist school by keeping black agency at the center of the narrative.	. . .

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