Black Reconstruction was Du Bois at his most thoroughly documented. He had been at the project for twenty years; the book runs to seven hundred pages of footnoted history. The argument is unfashionable in 1935 and would remain unfashionable in the U.S. academy until Eric Foner's Reconstruction in 1988 vindicated most of Du Bois's framework. By that point Du Bois had been dead for twenty-five years.
The central claim is that the period 1865 to 1877 was not, as the Dunning-school historiography had been teaching for a generation, a comic interlude of Black misgovernment ended by white redemption. It was a serious experiment in interracial democratic government, the first such in U.S. history, and it was ended not by the incapacity of the Black freedmen and the Reconstruction legislatures but by the deliberate withdrawal of Northern political and military support — itself the consequence of a re-alignment of Northern industrial capital with Southern planter capital after the Compromise of 1877.
The chapter titled 'The Propaganda of History,' which closes the book, is the most-quoted; it is Du Bois's audit of the white historiography that had been lying about Reconstruction for two generations. The chapter is short, fierce, and remains a useful model for how to write the kind of preface a serious revision of a field requires.
Five stars without qualification. The Free Press paperback is the standard. Read it before reading any subsequent U.S. history of the period; it will reorganize what you have been taught.
Editorial commentary
Du Bois's Black Reconstruction is, in the most literal sense, a work of historical revisionism. It revises the Dunning-school historiography that had dominated the academic interpretation of the Reconstruction period from the 1900s through the 1930s, and it does so on the basis of source material the Dunning historians had either ignored or misrepresented.
W.E.B. Du Bois lived from 1868 to 1963 — across the lifetime of the Reconstruction settlement and its complete reversal, the rise and consolidation of the segregation regime, two world wars, the early phase of African decolonization, and the first years of the civil-rights movement in the United States. He trained as a sociologist at Harvard and Berlin, published the first empirical sociological study of an American urban Black population (The Philadelphia Negro, 1899), co-founded the NAACP in 1909, edited The Crisis for nearly a quarter-century, organized or attended every Pan-African Conference from 1900 to 1945, and spent the final two years of his life in Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah. Reading any single Du Bois text in isolation is reading one cross-section of a sustained intellectual project; the project is more legible when the texts are read in sequence across his lifetime.
The book's economic argument, drawn from Du Bois's earlier engagement with Marxian categories, is that the Civil War had been a confrontation between two distinct economic systems — the slave economy of the cotton South and the industrial economy of the Northeast — and that the post-war settlement had produced an alliance between Northern industrial capital and Southern landed capital at the expense of both the freedpeople and the Southern white laboring poor.
The 'general strike' framework Du Bois develops to describe the wartime exodus of enslaved laborers from plantation labor to the Union army's lines has been one of the book's most influential contributions. Du Bois argues that the wartime exodus — involving five hundred thousand or more enslaved laborers at its peak — constituted a labor-political action of historic scale that substantially shaped the political and military trajectory of the war. The closing 'Propaganda of History' chapter examines the institutional mechanisms by which the Dunning-school interpretation had been produced and maintained.
The book was largely ignored by the American historical profession at the time of publication. Eric Foner's 1988 Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, which vindicated the major elements of Du Bois's framework, came out fifty-three years later. The 2017 Library of America edition, prepared by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kevin Gaines, has substantially expanded the book's accessibility for general readers; the 2020 Penguin Classics paperback offers an affordable classroom alternative.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.
Editorial commentary
Du Bois's Black Reconstruction is, in the most literal sense, a work of historical revisionism. It revises the Dunning-school historiography that had dominated the academic interpretation of the Reconstruction period from the 1900s through the 1930s, and it does so on the basis of source material the Dunning historians had either ignored or misrepresented.
W.E.B. Du Bois lived from 1868 to 1963 — across the lifetime of the Reconstruction settlement and its complete reversal, the rise and consolidation of the segregation regime, two world wars, the early phase of African decolonization, and the first years of the civil-rights movement in the United States. He trained as a sociologist at Harvard and Berlin, published the first empirical sociological study of an American urban Black population (The Philadelphia Negro, 1899), co-founded the NAACP in 1909, edited The Crisis for nearly a quarter-century, organized or attended every Pan-African Conference from 1900 to 1945, and spent the final two years of his life in Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah. Reading any single Du Bois text in isolation is reading one cross-section of a sustained intellectual project; the project is more legible when the texts are read in sequence across his lifetime.
The book's economic argument, drawn from Du Bois's earlier engagement with Marxian categories, is that the Civil War had been a confrontation between two distinct economic systems — the slave economy of the cotton South and the industrial economy of the Northeast — and that the post-war settlement had produced an alliance between Northern industrial capital and Southern landed capital at the expense of both the freedpeople and the Southern white laboring poor.
The 'general strike' framework Du Bois develops to describe the wartime exodus of enslaved laborers from plantation labor to the Union army's lines has been one of the book's most influential contributions. Du Bois argues that the wartime exodus — involving five hundred thousand or more enslaved laborers at its peak — constituted a labor-political action of historic scale that substantially shaped the political and military trajectory of the war. The closing 'Propaganda of History' chapter examines the institutional mechanisms by which the Dunning-school interpretation had been produced and maintained.
The book was largely ignored by the American historical profession at the time of publication. Eric Foner's 1988 Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, which vindicated the major elements of Du Bois's framework, came out fifty-three years later. The 2017 Library of America edition, prepared by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kevin Gaines, has substantially expanded the book's accessibility for general readers; the 2020 Penguin Classics paperback offers an affordable classroom alternative.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.