It may be that "liberty vs. power" was the central political trope of antebellum times, but that doesn't make it an accurate description of antebellum politics. Really, this book is a very simplistic account of that pivotal period. I suggest reading William Freehling's _The Road to Disunion_ for a more nuanced view.

Through this book I gained a better understanding of the politics of Jacksonian America. To call Liberty & Power a textbook would be a great injustice; Liberty & Power is more like a novel about a forgotten people and time.

This book by Harry Watson provides a facinating look at the Jacksonian era and the struggles between liberty and power in Antebellum America.

This book covers reconstruction in very thorough way. It gives some insight into current issue such as reparations. A good intro history.

I have never read Foner's longer treatment of this tragic period in American history, "Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution," but this abridgement gives an exellent overview of the subject. Foner debunks the theory that the "Radical Republicans" were the bad guys and the Andrew Johnson was a moderate acting in the spirit of Lincoln. In fact, there was very little progress in restoring rights to freedmen during the first year or two after the Civil War under Johnson's "moderate" approach. In fact, Johnson, while a firm supporter of the Union during the war was, in his views towards blacks, a racist as demonstrated by statemnets Johnson made and which this book documents. It was only after the "Radicals" forced federal intervention that blacks made significant progress. Unfortunately, Democrats began to make headway in the South, often by the use of intimidation and violence, and what remained of the Republican party began to change it's agenda. Certainly, the Republicans in the North became indifferent, culminating in President Rutherford B. Hayes' abandonment of Reconstruction after his narrow victory over Samuel Tilden in the 1876 election. This book is illumi\nating and well written. Although an abridgement, it reads smoothly rather than as a patchwork. I recommend this book to all who are interested in this underemphasized period of American history

Readers looking for the roots of difficulties that still plague the U.S. will find the perfect precis in A SHORT HISTORY OF THE RECONSTRUCTION. Civil rights freed of racial or gender limitations, race relations, states' rights versus federal laws, the rise of financial and business trusts, the foundations for all these "modern" issues are succinctly excavated and eloquently put on display by Foner in this great book. Should be required reading. Bravo!

When I saw this book on a list of book choices for U.S. History AP, I thought it would be a one-sided view and not expresses the beliefs of all races, specifically blacks. However, it was extremely detailed and went through every phase of the struggle. The text was not filled with statistics, as books often are about this topic. Specific incidents weren't in any way 'sugar-coated' and it was clear that the black struggle has been worse than the media and even our presidents have ever admitted. The last chapter, and the most current, proves that few strides have been taken to improve the lives of blacks. We see that times are getting better, but not for all people. Harvard Sitkoff has composed an excellent book that can open the eyes of anyone. A must-read for all!

The Struggle for Black Equality is an essential book for those (and they should be numerous) interested in the civil rights struggle in the U.S. It provides a necessary background in this field, together with the depth and style both the authors are capable of. Thematically as well as chronolically organized, this book can be useful for "beginners" in the field of American Black History, as well as for more advanced students in search of a good reference book.

I had to read this book for my History 401 class, a week long seminar recently completed. I was not particularly staggered by anything in it but it was pretty solid

Some of the more interesting things about this book include its portrayal of Martin Luther King and the evolution of his thinking. After the civil rights laws of 1964-65, King began to turn more and more towards criticising American capitalism and imperialism in Vietnam (of which he was one of the very first to speak out against). The commercially acceptable version of course is his warm and fuzzy "I have a dream" speech of the march on Washington which was orginally initially to be a mass sit-in at congress, the white house lawn and other government buildings with an emphasis on demanding economic rights but was pressured by the Kennedy administration into being very watered down.

The civil rights period was basically one where tens of thousands of blacks (and whites) risked mental and physical torture and even death to try to dismantle a fascist police state in the South and to try to badger the federal government to enforce its own basic laws on behalf of blacks. But if blacks now increasingly had the glorious right to vote, if they had more opportunities to advance in white capitalist society, they still had no infrastructure in their communities, were still at the mercy of white landlords, police and businesses which overcharged them as consumers and paid them starvation wages as laborers. The ideas of "Black Power" from Malcolm X to the Black Panthers tried to deal with these problems. Since then some things have got better and some things have got worse.

I think the authors somewhat exagerates the "white backlash", even at the time of this books appearance after the LA riots of 92'--it exists among whites to a perhaps signifigant extent but I think that he confuses the rightward shift among political elites and the media with the beliefs of the general population. If anything characterises the political beliefs of the white populations it is apathy e.g. in the 1994 congressional elections about thirty eight percent of those eligible to vote turned out and around nineteen percent of those voted republican. When the Gingrich revolutionaries took office polls showed that relatively few Americans had ever heard of the Contract with America. Polls show substantial support for social democratic measures amongst the general population of this country, despite all the campaigns against "welfare queens" and so on.

The author could have said something about Cointelpro and I probably would have given more or less emphasis to some things than he did.

This is one of those histories that reminds you how wonderful it is to be safely out of school.

Guess who Professor Foner has decided to blame for the "failure" of Reconstruction? The former slaveholders of the South whose descendants still argue that the "Civil War was not about slavery"? The 1840s immigrants from Europe whose racism was so deep and bitter that it led to the worst riot in American history (the New York City draft riots of 1864)?

Of course not. It was the Republican party - those awful people who brought us the 14th and 15th Amendments.

The unpolitically correct fact Professor Foner avoids is that the Union Army was the only effective force in favor of black equality after the Civil War. State and local governments - both North and South - were indifferent or hostile to the exercise of liberty by blacks and native Americans. The Freedman's Bureau was only able to do its job because those terrible people in the U.S. Army enforced what we now call civil rights.

Foner is so eager to avoid giving the Army its due that he fails to mention that its leader - Ulysses Grant - was the only President before Eisenhower to believe in black equality as Constitutional right. Without Grant there would have been no Reconstruction. When he left office (out of deference to the tradition that no President should serve more terms than the 1st one), Reconstruction was finished.

It is a measure of Grant's personal popularity that Americans respected his "naive" belief in fundamental equality of all Americans even if a majority of the electorate - North and South - did not share it. It is a measure of the unpopularity of civil rights among white Americans that it has taken more than a century for Grant's reputation to begin to recover from the presumption that only a drunk could think black people were equal.

Black people "failed" to gain political equality after the Civil War because the white Americans who had immigrated to the U.S. since 1840 and those who came after the Civil War joined with defeated Southerners to form a political alliance - the "modern" Democratic party - that overwhelmed the Republicans who had passed the 14th and 15th Amendments.

To accept the arguments of Foner and his admiring reviewers is to perpetuate the comfortable "radical" fantasy that but for those awful capitalists peace and harmony would be just around the corner.

Readers who are interested in the actual, tragic history of Reconstruction would be well-advised to read Stetson Kennedy's After Appomatox:How the South Won the Civil War and Brooks Simpson's Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction 1861-1868.

Based on 98 sets of private papers and more than fifty contemporary periodicals and newspapers, Eric Foner's Reconstruction is a superbly researched work of history. But this book is more than simply a synthesis that refutes the racist Dunning school interpretations. It is an invaluable and innovative work of history in its own right. First, Foner emphasizes the self-activity of the African-American community in its own right, as ex-slaves struggle to form their own churches, educate their children, revive their family life and mobilize themselves for political action. Second, Foner notes that racism cannot be seen as a diabolos de machina, dooming Reconstruction policies on the shoals of immutable prejudice, but as a complex phenomenon that, though very powerful, was also effected by other forces. Third, and perhaps most important, Foner explains the Reconstruction period as part of a transition towards capitalism. He is excellent on the implications and limitations of the Republican free labor policy, and on how African-Americans and white yeomanry tried to maintain their independence from the market and were ultimately sabatoged in this goal by the malevolence of the reconfigured and reconstitued Southern elite. For these passages alone, Foner has made an invaluable contribution to a Marxist interpretation of American history.

One should not forget Foner's considerable skills of summarization and detail. One remembers such details as the fact that Andrew Johnson was so cheap and penny-pinching that he opposed aid to assist the victims of the Irish potato famine. One is struck repeatedly by the use of violence to defeat Reconstruction (300 African-Americans alone were murdered by vigilantes in the summer of 1874 in Mississippi). One is also struck by Foner's insight on many issues. When I first read this book thirteen years I was amazed to realize that white opposition to the Confederacy was not simply confined to West Virginia and border states like Tennessee, but also to the interior regions of Alabama and North Carolina. There is also Foner's portrait of Lincoln who, if less than heroic in this account, is redemmed by an open-mindedness and willingness to consider alternatives. Foner also refutes the vulgar Beardian view that the Republican Radicals were nothing more than an advance army for Northern Industrialists, though at the same time pointing out the limitations of their laissez faire ideology. As the best volume in the Harper and Row New American Nation series one should point out that Foner also goes into detail about the transformation of the North, the rise of industrial capitalism, of labor protest, of the fate of the women's suffrage movement, and the brutal conquest of the West. Foner is also acute on the difficulties between the black-white alliance in much of the South, which was not merely the result of white racism, but also the undermining of yeomary independence and the contradictions of Southern Republican policy. (It needed to raise taxes to insure vital public services like education, but it also tried to encourage market production at a time when massive debt and low commodity prices insured the weakening of small landholders.)

But what makes Foner's account so superb is that it is a moving and haunting narrative of a great injustice and a great tragedy. Foner discusses the ungeneous attitude of the post Civil war Southern elite as they sought to reintroduce as much of slavery as they could, and as they vitiated education and the judiciary and other protections for freed people. To everyone's surprise the Radical Republicans are able to arouse enough popular opposition to overcome this. But they are limited by a tragic flaw: their free labour ideology cannot recognize the reality of class struggle. Their laissez-faire ideology limits their options. Foner is excellent on the fate of the land question, and he points out that land itself would not have ensured Africa-American prosperity. But every little bit helps and every little bit hurts. As one reads the results of "Redemption," and the rise of violence, disfranchisement, the sacking of black education, the adulteration of the judicial and creditor system to benefits whites against blacks and planters against everyone else, one learns a vital truth. The Reconstruction era was arguably the Republican party's finest hour, as it willingly went to the defense of a despised and powerless minority. By contrast, with its psychotic racism and fatuous laissez-faire cant, this was one of the worst hours of any American conservatism. In his History of the American People, Woodrow Wilson once condescendingly referred to the ex-slaves as "a host of dusky children untimely let out of school." Of course, slavery was a school whose pupils were forbidden to read and never allowed to graduate from. In reading this book, one can feel only rage at those intellectuals who euphemize violence and condescend to its victims.

A major undertaking. Eric Foner and Leon Litwack (Been in the Storm so Long) have rescued Reconstruction from the dustbin of history. Each has offered a timely re-exploration into one of the most pivotal periods in American History. For Foner, Reconstruction represents the often forgotten conclusion to the Civil War, an attempt to address the social injustices that resulted from over two centuries of slavery. What is even more compelling about Foner's account is that he absorbs the early women's suffrage movement into this early battle for Civil Rights.

This remarkably well-researched book gives probably the most thorough examination of Reconstruction to date. Foner begins in 1863 with the emancipation proclamation, and carries the era through to 1877, when a fateful compromise was reached by Republicans and Democrats which led to the notorious period of Redemption, in which most of the gains during this period of time were nullified.

Foner covers a tremendous amount of ground. He has uncovered old court records and other valuable information, which demonstrate just how active a role Blacks had in Reconstruction. He notes the seminal work of W.E.B. DuBois (Black Reconstruction in America), which went largely ignored by the "Dunning School," which interpreted Reconstruction as an unmitigated failure in social improvement. Foner, like DuBois, notes how many beneficial social changes came as a result of Reconstruction such as public health, education and welfare. But the Redeemers could hardly stand to see Blacks in power, and fought tooth and nail to re-establish the old social order in the South, finally winning over the Grant administration, which pardoned the Southern states, and allowed them to regain the political ascendency, much to the chagrin of the Radical Republicans, who had been instrumental in shaping the Civil Rights legislation of this time.

This book presents so many revealing portraits. It is as much a social as it is a political history of Reconstruction. Of the many compelling stories was the attempt by Blacks to make a thriving concern of the former Jefferson Davis plantation. Despite the fact that Jefferson Davis' brother had ceded the plantation to the former slaves, the Mississippi courts eventually gave title to Davis' heirs. During this brief halcyon period, the freedmen had made a success of the plantation, never realized under the Davis administration. Foner offers this case, as well as many others, to demonstrate that the former slaves were fully committed to Reconstruction, and so this as the opportunity to gain the social and political ascendency they had long been denied.

One is left to wonder what it might have been like had callous Republicans like Rutherford B. Hayes not sold out Reconstruction, and allowed the process to continue through the late 19th century. Instead, the Redeemers nullified much of what had been gained, leading to the notorious era of Jim Crow.

Eric Foner's, The Story of American Freedom, is, on the whole, well written and entertaining. Unfortunately, the book fails to deliver in some key respects. Despite the claim by Foner's colleaque, Alan Brinkley, which appears on the book's cover that this is a "history of the idea of freedom", the book is really no such thing. This is no intellectual history; rather it is narrative, social history in the traditional sense. The common thread is the invocation of the symbols and language of freedom throughout American history, but there is little cogent analysis of the idea itself. The book also falls prey to the author's well-worn ideology (if this book were floating it would be listing hopelessly to the left). In an almost finger-wagging prose the author engages in what is now a quotidian chastisement of the Founding generation, for the inconsistancy of their idealized strivings for political liberty and the existance of the institution of slavery. Foner throughout the book commits the perennial error of some ideological historians: an interest in the present dissembled as an interest in the past. Foner's book is far more political than was necessary and is the principle characteristic that flaws what might otherwise have been a fine work. All pretense to objectivity is abandoned by the final chapter, on the Reagan presidency and the conservative movement of the 1980s, where the author takes off on a path which might be described as tangential at best and polemical at worst. Without much substantive discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of the conservative notion of liberty, this "history of the idea of freedom" prefers to vituperatively condemn the Reagan Justice Department for "gutting civil rights enforcement", for failing to sufficiently oppose apartheid, and "all but eliminating" the priciple of progressivity in taxation. What all this has to do with the idea of freedom the poor unsuspecting reader is left to ponder. Needless to say, Foner's, The Story of American Freedom, is a dissapointment, and stands as another example of the all too common occurence of politicized, ideological histories coming out of the American Academy.

The first 100 pages or so basically tries to answer the question of how a 'free' country could permit slavery. After that the book describes the plight of what these days are called (inaccurately) 'special interest groups' and how they fit into the broader context of american history.

The book excels on many levels and is readable for a non scholar such as myself. It informs in a well written, accessible tone. The passage of time is done so smoothly you barely notice the changing eras. This device emphasizes the theme of freedom and is very effective. The author remains objective (aside from the descriptions of the Reagan era) throughout the story and has obviouly researched his subject thoroughly. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a good and thought provoking american history read.

Eric Foner's title - The Story of American Freedom - is well chosen. The word freedom is so central to our national creed and discourse that it is seldom examined closely. Freedom for who? Freedom for what? Freedom from what?

Foner shows that far from being a fixed concept, the story of freedom is an ever-changing one. In our nation's founding, freedom was only truly enjoyed by property-holding white males. The story ever since then has been the expansion of the meaning in two broad historical senses. One is the struggle of broad classes of people to gain freedom. The freeing of slaves is the most famous narrative in this sense, but it is only one of many. For example, before that was the broadening of the right for democratic participation to wage earners as well as property-holders

The other is the expansion of what freedom itself means. Foner is especially good at exploring this with respect to womens' movements to not only gain the right to vote, but also to exercise more control over their own bodies.

One star is deducted in this review for the last chapter, which shows the peril of historians writing "today's history." As other reviews have alluded, this is the most politicized part of the book. Foner's strong left bias shows a lttle too baldly. I say this as one who basically agrees with his politics.

Still, essential reading for anyone interested in who we are as a people.

but a collection of letters, notations, reports and the like from Civil War participants. As a chronicle, it is set up day by day, from 1861-1865, and offers one written piece per day from each side. No doubt it is in places very interesting, but it is not something I wanted to sit down and read through, nor is it something that would give the reader a cohesive sense of what was transpiring in the war on any given day. It is for me, rather, something to read when time is short.

I have a few problems with his book, which is a collection of old photographs and sketches and letters, reports and other original source material organized in a day-by-day format and with a short commentary for putting each of the original sources in context. The photographs sketches are very nice and contain some that I hadn't seen before (and some old favorites such as the landscape after Hood blew up his ammunition train when abandoning Atlanta). The source material is good when it deals with the politics and the home front, nicely including Baltimore riots, New York draft riots, currency legislation and Grant's Jew order, banning them from his theater of operations. The lacking part to the book is its treatment of military operations. Major battles are reduced to operations reports or letters home about 2/3 of a page long, there are no maps and the day-by-day format eliminates continuity. One is merely left with account after account of regiments being crushed and (in the commentary) casualty figures without any understanding of why operations occurred where and when they did. Worse, the commentary is full of errors. E.P. Alexander is identified as "Lee's chief of artillery". Lincoln made T.S.C. Lowe chief of army aeronautics after meeting him on June 11, 1963 after which he resigned in May 1963. The Union ironclad Carondelet is identified as wooden-hulled. The Confederate ram Albemarle is said to have "survived the mission, but it was so badly damaged that repairs could not be completed before war's end," on page 404, but then on page 467, we read of the Union raid that destroyed it.

Get this book if you want some contemporary flavor to add while you are reading a good general history of the civil war.

I originally thought this book would be the Civil War equivalent to Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldier. The topic is the same (the "common person"'s experiences in the war) but it is a compleatly different format.

This book is a portable archive from the civil war. Instead of being a narrative description of the civil war as seen by "common folk" it allows these charaters to speak for themselves through letters, diaries, and a variety of correspondance. Lots of photos.

I live too far away to visit a Civil war museum - this is the next best thing. You can draw your own inferences and interpretations from the letters and orders. Some are eye openning and show how times have changed; others show how similar these folks were to the 21st century folk.

Book is well worth owning!

I wonder if Raskin would ever be so hypercritical of just about every statement she has ever made, the way she is of Abbie. The book was interesting at first, but I feel she went way overboard in disecting everything Abbie said and how "factual" it really was. After a while it seemed like one big critique of everything Abbie said. Like she set out to prove he lied about everything. "Well, he said this and I went back and interviewed five different people who said it actually happened like this." To me a biography should be about how someone lived, not a dissection of everything they said. She really turned a fascinating story about a very creative and excitng person into almost a police report - "just the facts, mam."

This book really bugged me!

Abbie survived under fake ID, after a drug bust,but succumbed to personality disorder,for which he took medications, He was America's foremost radical->Activist- of 60's, he fought for the enviroment in 70's.....watch for movie of his life.."Steal this Movie"...

Without question, the best of the recent spate of Abbie Hoffman bios. Lucid, well-researched, with more than 200 oral histories. What prevents it from receiving a "10" rating is that Raskin devotes only one short chapter to Hoffman's life in the late seventies and eighties. Despite the lack of attention paid to Hoffman's later life, the material leading up to the last chapter flows nicely, and tells the story of a complex, energetic, and ultimately great American.

With American Reformers, Walters has composed a fine synthesis of secondary literature on the varied antebellum reform movements. In doing so, he argues that the reform impulse emerges out of evangelical Protestantism but by the Civil War takes a more secular turn more involved in legislating social controls than converting the hearts of individuals. As he develops this argument he addresses the different forms that this reform impulse took and organizes the book thematically. He discusses in successive chapters utopian movements and secular communitarians, abolition, the women's movement and the peace movement, temperance, health reform and spiritualism, working man's reform, and institutional reform, into which he groups mental hospitals, prisons and schools.

Walters demonstrates the secularization of reform in the realm of communitarian societies. Thus, the early nineteenth century utopian settlements that often emerged out of pietistic impulses gave way to more secular experiments in social engineering such as Owenism, or as in the case of Oneida, how a once religious community endured only as a commercial venture. Similarly he shows institutions such as asylums wove their religious inspiration with the science of the times but like prisons and almshouses became holding pens for outcasts rather than places for healing and reform.

Walters also situates the emergence of reform in the particular circumstances of antebellum America. He argues that the emergence of the middle class created made it possible for people to devote time to reform, and that technological advances in printing made it possible for people to actually make a living as an "agitator." He also argues that reform helped shape the identity of the emerging middle class. This point come through particularly clearly in his chapter on working man's reform.

Walters' synthesis suffers from its grand scope and short length. In it he sacrifices a certain amount of detail and analysis for space and clarity. The section on utopian movements, for example, traces the personalities of the major reformers and a brief outline of the community that followed without in-depth analysis. Throughout the book quotations from primary sources would have been helpful in giving a feel for the particular movement under discussion. The lack of primary source material allows Walters to sacrifice documentation, and the reader sometimes wishes for some assistance in discerning the origin or fuller development of a particular point. To his credit, Walters provides a good bibliographical essay at the end, but the lack of documentation sometimes proves frustrating and thus interrupts the otherwise smooth flow in the text. Nonetheless, American Reformers is a very readable and useful synthesis of the secondary sources on antebellum reform. As such, it is a helpful and welcome addition to the field.

American Reformers is a wonderful resource book. Walters has done a beautiful job blending information with intersting anecdotes. A great book for anyone interested in reform movements of the 19th century, and how they infuence contemporary society.

This is a compact, yet thorough, consideration of U. S. history from the American Revolution to the Civil War. In the acknowledgements Levine states plainly that his book is a "synthesis." The chapters themselves are organized around themes, and are carefully arranged throughout the book serving as building blocks for Levine's argument.

Levine's principal argument is that the essential conflict at the heart of antebellum America is between a free-labor system and a slave-labor system. And it is these systems that subsequently organize and order virtually every aspect of each section-economic, social, cultural, political. In both North and South ideas, beliefs, and mentalities are bundled together and serve to link various, and varied, groups within each section. Consequently, by the outbreak of the Civil War there is widespread support in both the Union and the Confederacy. This book is sometimes densely written, but Levine succeeds in fusing labor history and social history. His bibliography indicates he has drawn on a vast array of sources, tapping into many schools of thought. The argument exists principally in the first half of the book. Subsequently the second half becomes something of a "prelude to disunion" narrative.

levine does a good job on this book.
his research is pretty well. he documents
that the civil war was just about an
economic cycle, a cycle of money for the
white southern man, the rich man to be precise.
i like this book, because there is an inner world
that usually never gets talked about, but levine
proves that the cycle of racism and hatred by the
white man toward the black female and male were
intense.
literature is highly recommended.