![]() The last chapter summarizing key Supreme Court decisions that significantly undermined the amendments can be tough sledding, but well worth the effort. history “unfamiliar to many, perhaps most Americans,” Foner notes.īut now, with this book, we have a compact (under 200 pages), cogently argued and only occasionally dense history lesson. to build an egalitarian society on the ashes of slavery.”Īt the heart of that effort were the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which abolished slavery established birthright citizenship and equal protection of the law and gave black men the right to vote. ![]() produced a PBS series on Reconstruction and a companion book, “Stony the Road,” exploring those same years when, as Foner says, the United States “made its first attempt. This past spring Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. ![]() “We live at a moment in some ways not unlike the 1890s and early 20th century, when state governments, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, stripped black men of the right to vote and effectively nullified the constitutional promise of equality.” “Recently, we have experienced a slow retreat from the ideal of racial equality,” he writes. ![]() Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor emeritus at Columbia University, has written many books about the Civil War, Reconstruction and slavery, but this one seems particularly attuned to the current political moment. ![]()
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