| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States. Ed. by Thomas J. Brown. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. x, 246 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-19-517595-0.)

Reconstructions, a collection of historiographic essays dealing with every conceivable aspect of Reconstruction literature published in the last sixty years, might just as well be called After Foner. In every essay Eric Foner's grand synthesis of the era, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988), looms as the elephant in the room that everyone steps around with a healthy respect for its bulk and power. Indeed, there occasionally arises in the essays a lament of sorts that portrays recent studies of the era as constricted by Foner's synthesis of social and political history. That line of argument sees his juxtaposition of black agency set against a failure of political will among northern reformers as a tragic narrative that has become so convincing as to prevent other questions and investigations. Several authors in the collection complain that gender as both a subject and a category of analysis has been squeezed out of the master narrative of Reconstruction. Others argue that Foner's emphasis on black agency has precluded the study of conflicts and divisions within black communities after the Civil War that may have significantly weakened the ability of black leaders to deal with powerful southern whites.

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