Reconstructions: New Perspectives on Postbellum AmericaThe pivotal era of Reconstruction has inspired an outstanding historical literature. In the half century after W. E. B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a host of thoughtful and energetic authors helped to dismantle racist stereotypes about the aftermath of emancipation and Union victory in the Civil War. The resolution of long running interpretive debates shifted the issues at stake in Reconstruction scholarship, but the topic