After Lincoln

Gridlock in Congress, a debilitating economic crisis, racial inequality, and threats of impeachment. What year is this? Tom Perkins narrates this comprehensive account of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era (1865-1877). His balanced journalistic tone lays equal culpability on Northern hard-liners, who wanted the South to pay dearly for splitting from the Union, and Southern apologists, who found ways to systematically strip freed blacks of their new Constitutional rights. From Charles Sumner to Nathan Bedford Forrest to Ulysses S. Grant, nobody comes out smelling like a rose, but Perkins's voice has an inherently American optimism. Overall, the work suggests that if the nation made it through Reconstruction, we can make it through anything. B.P. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine