Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality (LOA #303)

Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality (LOA #303)
Author: Brooks D. Simpson
Publisher: Library of America
Total Pages: 865
Release: 2018-01-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1598535633

The aftermath of the Civil War comes to dramatic life in this sweeping new collection of firsthand writing from the Reconstruction era—featuring pieces by Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, and more “Very, very good. . . . Reconstruction conveys the struggle for racial equality better than many other anthologies documenting the era.” —The Wall Street Journal Few periods in American history are more consequential but less understood than Reconstruction, the tumultuous twelve years after Appomattox, when the battered nation sought to reconstitute itself and confront the legacy of two centuries of slavery. This anthology brings together more than one hundred contemporary letters, diary entries, interviews, testimonies, and articles by ordinary men and women and well-known figures such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Ulysses S. Grant, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Twain, and Albion Tourgée. Through their eyes readers experience the fierce contest between President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans resulting in the nation's first presidential impeachment; the adoption of the revolutionary 14th and 15th Amendments; the first achievements of black political power; and the murderous terrorism of the Klan and other groups that, combined with northern weariness, indifference, and hostility, eventually resulted in the restoration of white supremacy in the South. Throughout, Americans confront the essential questions left unresolved by the defeat of secession: What system of labor would replace slavery, and what would become of the southern plantations? Would the war end in the restoration of a union of sovereign states, or in the creation of a truly national government? What would citizenship mean after emancipation, and what civil rights would the freed people gain? Would suffrage be extended to African American men, and to all women?

Reporting Civil Rights Vol. 1 (LOA #137)

Reporting Civil Rights Vol. 1 (LOA #137)
Author:
Publisher: Library of America
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2003-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781931082280

First published for the fortieth anniversary of the March on Washington, this Library of America volume along with its companion chronicles over thirty tumultuous years in the struggle of African-Americans for freedom and equal rights. The first volume follows the rise of the modern civil rights movement from A. Philip Randolph’s defiant 1941 call for a protest march on Washington to the summer of 1963 and the eve of the march that finally shook the nation’s conscience. Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Pauli Murray, and Bayard Rustin record the growing determination of African-Americans in the 1940s to oppose racial injustice; Murray Kempton and William Bradford Huie report on the lynching of Emmett Till; Ted Poston offers an inside look at the courage and resourcefulness of the Montgomery bus boycotters; Relman Morin in Little Rock and John Steinbeck in New Orleans witness the terrors of mob rage; David Halberstam and Louis Lomax describe the wildfire spread of the sit-in movement; James Baldwin investigates the Nation of Islam. Robert Penn Warren’s “Segregation,” a Southern moderate’s soul-searching interrogation of the traditions of his native region, is included in its entirety, as is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s classic defense of civil disobedience, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Remarkable but little-known reporters from the African-American press, among them James Hicks of the Amsterdam News, George Collins of the Baltimore Afro-American, L. O. Swingler of the Atlanta Daily World, and Trezzvant Anderson of the Pittsburgh Courier, are reprinted here for the first time, along with astonishing eyewitness accounts of movement activism by Fannie Lou Hamer, Tom Hayden, and Howard Zinn. Each volume contains a detailed chronology of events, biographical profiles and photographs of the journalists, explanatory notes, and an index. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Reconstruction

Reconstruction
Author: Allen C. Guelzo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190865695

Allen C. Guelzo's Reconstruction: A Concise History is a gracefully written interpretation of Reconstruction as a spirited struggle to reintegrate the defeated Southern Confederacy into the American Union after the Civil War, to bring African Americans into the political mainstream of American life, and to recreate the Southern economy after a Northern free-labor model.

The Wars of Reconstruction

The Wars of Reconstruction
Author: Douglas R. Egerton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 552
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608195740

A groundbreaking new history, telling the stories of hundreds of African-American activists and officeholders who risked their lives for equality-in the face of murderous violence-in the years after the Civil War. By 1870, just five years after Confederate surrender and thirteen years after the Dred Scott decision ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship, Congressional action had ended slavery and given the vote to black men. That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively. In South Carolina, only twenty years after the death of arch-secessionist John C. Calhoun, a black man, Jasper J. Wright, took a seat on the state's Supreme Court. Not even the most optimistic abolitionists thought such milestones would occur in their lifetimes. The brief years of Reconstruction marked the United States' most progressive moment prior to the civil rights movement. Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But in this sweeping, prodigiously researched narrative, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some fifteen hundred African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance. Tragically, their movement was met by ruthless violence-not just riotous mobs, but also targeted assassination. With stark evidence, Egerton shows that Reconstruction, often cast as a “failure” or a doomed experiment, was rolled back by murderous force. The Wars of Reconstruction is a major and provocative contribution to American history.

Selma to Saigon

Selma to Saigon
Author: Daniel S. Lucks
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2014-03-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813145090

In Selma to Saigon Daniel S. Lucks explores the impact of the Vietnam War on the national civil rights movement. Through detailed research and a powerful narrative, Lucks illuminates the effects of the Vietnam War on leaders such as Whitney Young Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as lesser-known Americans in the movement who faced the threat of the military draft as well as racial discrimination and violence.

The Hidden Rules of Race

The Hidden Rules of Race
Author: Andrea Flynn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 110841754X

This book explores the racial rules that are often hidden but perpetuate vast racial inequities in the United States.

American Military History Volume 1

American Military History Volume 1
Author: Army Center of Military History
Publisher:
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2016-06-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781944961404

American Military History provides the United States Army-in particular, its young officers, NCOs, and cadets-with a comprehensive but brief account of its past. The Center of Military History first published this work in 1956 as a textbook for senior ROTC courses. Since then it has gone through a number of updates and revisions, but the primary intent has remained the same. Support for military history education has always been a principal mission of the Center, and this new edition of an invaluable history furthers that purpose. The history of an active organization tends to expand rapidly as the organization grows larger and more complex. The period since the Vietnam War, at which point the most recent edition ended, has been a significant one for the Army, a busy period of expanding roles and missions and of fundamental organizational changes. In particular, the explosion of missions and deployments since 11 September 2001 has necessitated the creation of additional, open-ended chapters in the story of the U.S. Army in action. This first volume covers the Army's history from its birth in 1775 to the eve of World War I. By 1917, the United States was already a world power. The Army had sent large expeditionary forces beyond the American hemisphere, and at the beginning of the new century Secretary of War Elihu Root had proposed changes and reforms that within a generation would shape the Army of the future. But world war-global war-was still to come. The second volume of this new edition will take up that story and extend it into the twenty-first century and the early years of the war on terrorism and includes an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.

Hoosiers and the American Story

Hoosiers and the American Story
Author: Madison, James H.
Publisher: Indiana Historical Society
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2014-10
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0871953633

A supplemental textbook for middle and high school students, Hoosiers and the American Story provides intimate views of individuals and places in Indiana set within themes from American history. During the frontier days when Americans battled with and exiled native peoples from the East, Indiana was on the leading edge of America’s westward expansion. As waves of immigrants swept across the Appalachians and eastern waterways, Indiana became established as both a crossroads and as a vital part of Middle America. Indiana’s stories illuminate the history of American agriculture, wars, industrialization, ethnic conflicts, technological improvements, political battles, transportation networks, economic shifts, social welfare initiatives, and more. In so doing, they elucidate large national issues so that students can relate personally to the ideas and events that comprise American history. At the same time, the stories shed light on what it means to be a Hoosier, today and in the past.

Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State

Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State
Author: Megan Ming Francis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2014-04-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107037107

This book extends what we know about the development of civil rights and the role of the NAACP in American politics. Through a sweeping archival analysis of the NAACP's battle against lynching and mob violence from 1909 to 1923, this book examines how the NAACP raised public awareness, won over American presidents, secured the support of Congress, and won a landmark criminal procedure case in front of the Supreme Court.