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Blight's study of how Americans remembered the Civil War in the 50 years after Appomattox exemplifies these themes. Moreover, forgetting some aspects of the past is as much a part of historical Rather than being straightforward and unproblematic, it is ''constructed,'' battled over and in many ways political. In recent years, the study of historical memory has become something of a scholarly cottage Blight demonstrates that as soon as the guns fell silent, debate over how to remember the Civil War began. The past few years have witnessed disputes over the flying of the Confederate battle flag above the South Carolina Statehouse and the decision by the National Park Service to devote more attention to slavery at its battlefield By ERIC FONERĮarly a century and a half after it ended, the Civil War remains the central event in American history and an enduring source of public controversy. This "smart book of enormous strengths" ( Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period-an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.A historian studies how Reconstruction influenced the legacy of the Civil War in America. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.

Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans-black and white-responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" ( New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America, with a new introduction from the author.Įric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" ( New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed.