There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Six trenchant “visual essays” by Joshua Brown discuss how visual imagery often negatively influenced white attitudes toward African-Americans.Ī succinct, discerning study of the nation’s first aborted attempt at racial equality.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. But labor unrest made Northerners more sympathetic to white Southerners’ objections to Reconstruction, and the Republicans grew increasingly reluctant to use federal troops to protect African-Americans from what Foner calls “domestic terrorism” perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups.

Nevertheless, Foner shows, at the height of Reconstruction in the early 1870s, an unprecedented experiment-biracial democracy-had produced for the first time in the South tax-supported school systems and laws that protected laborers and outlawed discrimination. (If the North had been as vindictive after the Civil War as was claimed, Foner points out, then Confederate leaders would have been put on trial, with planters exiled en masse.) With Abraham Lincoln assassinated and the Radical Republicans’ program of land redistribution derailed, hopes for economic progress for freedmen were dealt crushing blows. Foner (History/Columbia Univ.) sees these as myths perpetrated by Southern merchants, planters and entrepreneurs out to disenfranchise former slaves. For nearly a century, historians characterized Reconstruction as a “tragic era” of GOP misrule and corruption by ignorant freedmen, Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags.

Half the length and without the footnotes of Foner’s Bancroft Prize–winning Reconstruction (1988), this account introduces new scholarship and features evocative period art, including posters, cartoons and photographs. A sterling account of Reconstruction, that misunderstood period of revolution and reaction following the Civil War.

Forever free eric foner