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books

The Crooked Path to Abolition

Robert S. Davis New York Journal of Books
This book shows how the country's anti-slavery sentiment based its views an abolitionist reading of the Constitution, and how that understanding influenced Lincoln's thinking.

National Report on the Teaching of Reconstruction

Zinn Education Project Zinn Education Project
The dominant and distorted scholarship framed Reconstruction as an illegitimate enterprise that failed to sustain multiracial democracy. For much of the 20th century, this bogus history was used to justify denying Black people full citizenship.

books

This Guilty Land

Eric Foner London Review of Books
A leading historian of 19th century US history reviews two recent books on Lincoln and John Brown, charting the background to the Civil War and its lingering heritage today.
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