Reddit reviews Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863 - 1877

All God’s Danger’s: The Life of Nate Shaw

Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877
All God’s Dangers is the first person story of a share cropper who was the son of a slave.
Reconstruction is a scholarly book on the period of US history directly after the civil war.

Nope, it was created by Confederate veterans to kill and intimidate uppity black people, although to quote Eric Foner (historian who wrote Reconstruction):

"In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.[58] To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of blacks.[58] The Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a "reign of terror against Republican leaders both black and white. Those political leaders assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who served in constitutional conventions".

You cannot get more American than being racist.

The Union rehabilitated the Confederate leaders and put them in power instead of doing what they should have: hanging them all. During reconstruction the first public welfare programs were built and radical experiments in democracy kicked off, but then the ex-Confederate leaders killed that and began Jim Crow. The Confederates may have lost the battle for chattel slavery, but they won the war in racist domination. We are still living with that system, albeit in an advanced and evolved form.

Historian Eric Foner is the best on this topic:

>Lincoln did not live to preside over Reconstruction. That task fell to his successor, Andrew Johnson. Once lionized as a heroic defender of the Constitution against Radical Republicans, Johnson today is viewed by historians as one of the worst presidents to occupy the White House. He was incorrigibly racist, unwilling to listen to criticism and unable to work with Congress. Johnson set up new Southern governments controlled by ex-Confederates. They quickly enacted the Black Codes, laws that severely limited the freed people’s rights and sought, through vagrancy regulations, to force them back to work on the plantations.

Why Reconstruction Matters

His book, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863 - 1877 is essential reading.

EDIT: I just remembered hearing an interview with James Q. Whitman, American lawyer and Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale University on how the Nazis emulated the United States:

>Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies.

>As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws―the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.

>Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691172420/leftbusinessobseA

Interview with the author: http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/RadioArchive/2017/17_05_25.mp3