African Americans in the Reconstruction era /

This extraordinary volume presents an interpretation of the place of African Americans in the era of post-Civil War Reconstruction by a scholar from the People's Republic of China. Gao's dissertation, translated into English, finds that discrimination against African Americans is inborn in whites and that slavery was its extreme manifestation. Although slavery was destroyed by the Civil War, the era of Reconstruction that followed sustained the coercive power of whites over blacks. Racism was the central force of Reconstruction and became the tragic weakness in American social relations for many decades to follow. Scholars and students will not find much new here since Gao's study is drawn almost entirely from secondary works by major American scholars such as Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (CH, Oct'88) and Leon Litwack's Been in the Storm So Long (CH, Nov'79). In translation, Gao's prose is stilted, but his interpretation is clear. Includes an index, 1,059 footnotes, and a six-page bibliography drawn mostly from secondary works printed in the 1960s and 1970s. The book is probably too limited for most university and public libraries, although it does give a rare perspective on African American history. R. Detweiler; California Polytechnic State University--San Luis Obispo