The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

Reconstruction-era literature helped shape an ongoing national debate about proper remedies to racial wrongs.

In this powerful book, Brook Thomas revisits the contested era of Reconstruction. He evokes literature’s immediacy to recreate arguments still unresolved today about state versus federal authority, the government’s role in education, the growing power of banks and corporations, the paternalism of social welfare, efforts to combat domestic terrorism, and the difficult question of who ...