An anthology of important scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras from the journal Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association. Since 1931, the South Carolina Historical Association has published an annual, peer-reviewed journal of historical scholarship. In this volume, past SCHA officers of Michael Brem Bonner and Fritz Hamer present twenty-three of the most enduring and significant essays from the archives, offering a treasure trove of scholarship on an impressive variety of subjects including race, politics, military events, and social issues. All articles published in the Proceedings after 2002 are available on the SCHA website, but this volume offers, for the first time, easy access to the journal’s best articles on the Civil War and Reconstruction up through 2001. Preeminent scholars such as Frank Vandiver, Dan T. Carter, and Orville Vernon Burton are among the contributors to this collection, an essential resource for historical synthesis of the Palmetto State’s experience during that era.

Examining the southern memory of Reconstruction, in all its forms, is an essential element in understanding the society and politics of the twentieth-century South.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication in 1935, Black Reconstruction has only grown in historical and literary importance. In the 1960s it joined the canon of the most influential revisionist historical works. Its greatest achievement is weaving a credible, lyrical historical narrative of the hostile and politically fraught years of 1860-1880 with a powerful critical analysis of the harmful effects of democracy, including Jim Crow laws and other injustices. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by David Levering Lewis, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

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.