Professor Jennifer Burns | Newsletter

Dear 7b Listener,

Greetings and welcome to the first installment of my newsletter! I have created this newsletter so that I can stay in touch with listeners and address some of the questions you’ve sent in. Due to the volume of e-mail I receive, I can’t respond personally to everyone, but I will address some of your messages in this and future editions.

First, a few updates. As of this summer I’m no longer teaching at UC Berkeley. I’m off to a few different places that should be equally exciting:

– In 2007-2008 I will be a Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  This fellowship will give me a full year to work on my forthcoming book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

– In the fall of 2008, I will join the faculty at the University of Virginia as Assistant Professor of History.

Now, on to the history. I’ve received several inquiries about Reconstruction, the period of United States history immediately following the Civil War, from 1865-1877. See below for a few reading suggestions if you’d like to learn more about this era.

Regards,

Jennifer Burns

Books about Reconstruction

For more on Reconstruction, I recommend starting with one of the following books:

Leon Litwack, Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. This is a classic, Pulitzer-prize winning text written by one of Berkeley’s most prominent historians. Litwack has been beloved by generations of Berkeley students and taught History 7b for decades prior to his retirement this year (I taught the course when he took a rare sabattical). This book is built on a prodigious amount of research, including government documents, personal papers, and WPA interviews with freed slaves. Although the title indicates an interest in the fate of freed slaves, Litwack’s book is really an interracial history that pays close attention to how blacks and whites renegotiated their relationships after the demise of slavery.

Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction. One of the definitive texts on the period, Foner’s short work takes a panoramic look at Reconstruction, from national politics to Southern life on the ground during the aftermath of war. Foner’s text is notably for the emphasis it places on the agency of everyday people, particularly freedpeople. This is an abridgement of Foner’s longer work, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America. First published in 1935 and once ignored by historians, this book by the polymathic Du Bois is now considered a pathbreaking treatment of the subject. Unlike his contemporaries, Du Bois, an African-American, did not view Reconstruction through the lens of white supremacy. His historical account was grounded in research and deeply influenced Foner, Litwack, and other historians of the South.