The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

This concise treatise on the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments and the judicial rulings in the wake of Reconstruction which allowed Jim Crow laws to stymie equal rights for nearly eight decades masquerades itself as a history book. Written by the renown historian and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Fiery Trail, Eric Foner creates something beyond mere historical narration in his latest work.

The beauty of Foner’s work lies in its brevity. Masterfully organized, in less than two hundred pages the reader sweeps through half a century of jurisprudence in the aftermath of the most important legislation since the creation of the Bill of Rights.

Foner not only confronts the bald prejudices and congressmen of old, but he also lays bare the fact that those old judicial rulings remain undisturbed and have recently been cited as “good law” in current United States Supreme Court decisions.

Specifically, Foner addresses the lingering effects currently applied to issues such as immigration, and the disputes over who is a citizen and who is not, and what rights or limitations to those rights may be imposed by the government. To all students of law and political science, this book should be added to your library.