Black Reconstruction in America

W. E. B. Du Bois published this history of the Reconstruction era in 1935, when the accepted academic view held that the period was a failure and played down the part African Americans played in it. Du Bois argued the opposite. He emphasized the agency of Black people and freed slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and framed the era as one that held the promise of a democracy run by workers in place of a plantation economy built on slavery.