Black Reconstruction in America
A 1935 revisionist history of the Reconstruction era (1860-1880) arguing that freed Black Americans were central actors in a briefly successful experiment in interracial democracy, written against the then-dominant Dunning School account. Du Bois pairs state-by-state documentation with a Marxist economic analysis and closes with a famous critique of how American historians wrote the period. Page count is the standard in-print Free Press paperback (1998, intro. David Levering Lewis, ISBN 9780684856575), 768 pages, verified on the Simon & Schuster publisher page.
768 pages, and the long middle is the same chapter rewritten for each Confederate state: "a lot of their histories were VERY similar," one reader reports, "and it's tough to pay attention." Du Bois makes it worse by pasting his evidence in whole ("he quotes from some sources at length, and these can slow you down"), so the chapters stall twice over, once from sameness and once from block quotation. Then the frame: even a sympathetic reader balks at "his exclusive use of a Marxist economic lens to interpret history," class struggle stamped onto a period that keeps wriggling out of its categories. The state chapters blur badly enough that one finisher warns, "I should NOT have attempted this as an audiobook."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
