The Era of Reconstruction

This brief political history of reconstruction is an attempt to give more general currency to the findings of scholars during the past few decades. Based on accumulated material on reconstruction for lectures for college students.

Kenneth M. Stampp was an acclaimed scholar, teacher, and historian of the Civil War period. He is best known for The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South and The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877, two books that staunchly challenged previous historians' romanticized depictions of slave-owner relationships and the state of the South during the Reconstruction. These works helped revolutionize the study of the period and remain staples of university classrooms. Stampp, who was the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley, died in 2009.