About the Book

Los Angeles Times Book Award

The Bancroft Prize

The Trilling Prize

The Parkman Prize

National Book Award Finalist

This “masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history” (New Republic) made history itself when first published in 1988. It redefined how Reconstruction was viewed in its chronicling of how Americans — both black and white — responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery.

Eric Foner explores all aspects of Reconstruction, from race relations to politics to economic change in a clear and accessible style that brings this tumultuous era to life. This award-winning volume has become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period — an era whose legacy still reverberates today.

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, is the author of numerous works on American history, including Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War; Tom Paine and Revolutionary America; and The Story of American Freedom. He has served as president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and has been named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities.

“With this book, Mr. Foner becomes the preeminent historian of Reconstruction.” — New York Times Book Review

Critical Praise

"This is history written on a grand scale, a masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history." — New Republic

“The [book’s] rewards stem from Foner’s deep understanding of the literature of the period and his ability to draw freely from it, so that his arguments sprout in deep soil; and from his disciplined imagination, which neither approves nor condemns, but characterizes, and at its best dramatizes situations, preserving and savoring their possibilities, so that the betrayal of Reconstruction with a terrible poignancy.” — Theodore Rosengarten, The Nation

"With this book, Mr. Foner becomes the preeminent historian of Reconstruction." — New York Times Book Review

"[Reconstruction] may very well turn out to be this generation's defining interpretation of this most misunderstood passage in the nation's history." — Wall Street Journal

"A remarkable clarity is one of the many beauties of this book that dwells on so many conflicts and ambiguities . . . Foner's Reconstruction is a smart book of enormous strengths." — Boston Globe

“Eric Foner has put together this terrible story with greater cogency and power, I believe, than has been brought to the subject heretofore.” — New York Review of Books

“Foner’s book traces in rich detail the bitter course of the history of the South’s failure to adjust to the revolution that brought the Civil War. Only by tracing that history and understanding can the region fully disenthrall itself even today. No book could be more timely. ” — Atlanta Constitution

“Foner’s book brings to distinguished fruition one great cycle of Reconstruction historiography.” — New York Review of Books

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Product Details

• ISBN: 9780062354518
• ISBN 10: 0062354515
• Imprint: Harper Perennial
• On Sale: 12/02/2014
• Trimsize: 6.000 in (w) x 9.000 in (h) x 1.500 in (d)
• Pages: 752
• List Price: $25.99
• BISAC1 : HISTORY / Study & Teaching
• BISAC2 : HISTORY / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877)
• BISAC3 : POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory