The newest volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, The Republic for Which It Stands argues that the Gilded Age, along with Reconstruction--its conflicts, rapid and disorienting change, hopes and fears--formed the template of American modernity.

Designed to be either the primary anthology or textbook for the course, this best-selling title covers the Civil War's entire chronological span with a series of documents and essays.

The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time. This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 has justly been called a classic.

provides history teachers with dozens of primary and secondary source documents, close reading exercises, lesson plans, and activity suggestions that will push students both to build a complex understanding of the dilemmas and conflicts Americans faced during Reconstruction.

From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America, with a new introduction from the author. Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed. Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.

Stampp's classic work offers a revisionist explanation for the radical failure to achieve equality for blacks, and of the effect that Conservative rule had on the subsequent development of the South. Refuting former schools of thought, Stampp challenges the notions that slavery was somehow just a benign aspect of Southern culture, and how the failures during the reconstruction period created a ripple effect that is still seen today. Praise for The Era of Reconstruction: “ . . . This “brief political history of reconstruction” by a well-known Civil War authority is a thoughtful and detailed study of the reconstruction era and the distorted legends still clinging to it.”—Kirkus Reviews “It is to be hoped that this work reaches a large audience, especially among people of influence, and will thus help to dispel some of the myths about Reconstructions that hamper efforts in the civil rights field to this day.”—Albert Castel, Western Michigan University

“Gripping and essential.”—Jesse Wegman, New York Times An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins in antebellum activism and adoption amidst intense postwar politics to their virtual nullification by narrow Supreme Court decisions and Jim Crow state laws. Today these amendments remain strong tools for achieving the American ideal of equality, if only we will take them up.