The Tragic Era was considered a legitimate text book during the Depression and for many years afterward. However its historical view is pro-confederate, racist, and totally propagandistic. In this book you will find the arguement that slaves were happy and treated well, that after the Civil War the evil Northerners raped and pillaged the South unmercifully for 12 years, and that the angelic white men of the South only became racially bigoted because it was forced on them by the uppity freed slaves. This piece of trash is on the same quality level as Mein Kampf. If you want a realistic exploration of the Reconstruction period read Kenneth M. Stampp's "The Era of Reconstruction".

It has become fashionable to cheer on the Reconstruction radicals and carpetbaggers who turned what might have been a period of healing and growth into a nightmare for many dispossessed Southerners. Read this (slightly creaky) old classic for a corrective view -- one that portrays William Lloyd Garrison, Thaddeus Stevens, et al as the zealous Utopian totalitarians that they were. V.S. Naipaul would understand this book.