Critical Reception
The work was not well received by critics and historians at the time. One major point of contention was Du Bois' critique of the way contemporary historians wrote about the role of former slaves during Reconstruction. Du Bois lists a number of books and writers that he felt were misrepresenting the Reconstruction period, and specifically highlights what he felt were particularly racist or ill informed works. Du Bois felt that certain historians were overly concerned with maintaining the "southern white fairytale" instead of accurately chronicling the events and key figures of Reconstruction.
The reception of Black Reconstruction changed dramatically in the 1960s, when numerous historians began to seriously examine it and contemporary works by Alrutheus A. Taylor, Francis Simkins, and Robert Woody. This re-examination ignited a "revisionist" trend in the historiography of Reconstruction, which emphasized black people's search for freedom and the era's radical policy changes. Post-revisionist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s tempered some of these claims by highlighting continuities in the political aims of white politicians before and during reconstruction. However, Du Bois' insistence on the revolutionary character of Reconstruction was reaffirmed by Eric Foner's landmark book on the subject, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. By the twenty-first century, Black Reconstruction was widely perceived as "the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography."
Read more about this topic: Black Reconstruction
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)