Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880.

DU BOIS, W.E.B.

$5,000.00

Item Number: 135136

New York: S.A. Russell Company, 1956.

First Harbor Scholars’ Classics edition of Du Bois’ self-proclaimed magnum opus which challenged the standard academic view and helped spark “the long attempt to rescue black history in America.” Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by the author on the front free endpaper. Very good in the original dust jacket which is in good condition. Rare and desirable signed.

With Black Reconstruction, the work Du Bois considered his magnum opus, he fundamentally "helped to launch the long attempt to rescue black history in America from what many scholars have called a 'structural amnesia'… Black Reconstruction challenged much more than historiography… the Civil War, black freedom and the Reconstruction of the South, Du Bois seemed to be saying, ought to have been the epic of American democracy" (Fabre, History and Memory, 58-65). "A sweeping corrective to contemporary histories of the Reconstruction era, which (white) historians had shaped with the view of blacks as inadequate to the task of capitalizing on the freedom that emancipation had given them, and black history as 'separate, unequal and irrelevant' in the words of Du Bois' Pulitzer prize-winning biographer David Levering Lewis" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)