Black Reconstruction

Upon publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction - and of American democracy itself. Black Reconstruction is a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship that, in the wake of censorship toward Du Bois's characterisation of Reconstruction by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was written to debunk influential historians whose racist ideas and emphases had disfigured the historical record. Here Black Reconstruction is joined, for the first time in a single volume with important writings that trace his thinking throughout his career about Reconstruction and its centrality in understanding American democracy.