The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
Eric Foner
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
Eric Foner
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Second Founding reflects Foner’s rigorously researched, now mainstream view that Reconstruction was 'a massive experiment in interracial democracy'; the changes wrought by the Civil War amendments were the product of decades of debate and so radical that they represented, in the words of one Republican leader, 'a constitutional revolution'.
The Second Founding...demonstrates [Foner's] talent at unearthing insights about the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, in particular how Americans defined and acted on the ideals of freedom and democracy. It’s a slim volume that synthesizes the vast library of works devoted to Reconstruction. But he uses that rich scholarship to highlight the radicalism of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and how, over the past 150 years, clever and powerful conservatives have diligently sought to undermine their egalitarian promise.
... a slender yet potent study that illuminates how the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments...were hammered into the Constitution.
As the dean of Reconstruction studies, Foner is the ideal scholar to produce a history of the three amendments added to the Constitution during the period—amendments so powerful as to justify the book’s title, The Second Founding. He shows how each of them had its origins in the antislavery constitutionalism of the pre–Civil War abolitionist movement. Yet each was also the product of the specific moment in which it was proposed and ratified.
... short, closely argued.
The Second Founding exhibits the sterling qualities we have come to expect in Foner’s scholarship, particularly the careful, nuanced judgments. Resisting the overwrought pessimism currently fashionable in some parts of the left, he highlights a remarkable episode in which progressive change erupted unexpectedly. Who could have imagined in 1860 that within a decade an African American would replace the defeated president of the Confederacy as the representative of Mississippi in the Senate? But Foner also insists on recognising the strong pull of racism in American affairs..
Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor emeritus at Columbia University, has written many books about the Civil War, Reconstruction and slavery, but this one seems particularly attuned to the current political moment.
Foner examines in minute detail the differences between rights and equality as perceived in the Reconstruction era and beyond.
Foner has a knack for looking at past conflicts through the lens of the present, without allowing the present to distort the past.
Foner brilliantly shows that the federal government’s actions in the 19th century continue to resonate today.
... [a] lucid legal history and political manifesto.
... engrossing.