Into the Land of Freedom: African Americans in Reconstruction (People's History)

Greene, Meg

ISBN 10: 0822546906 ISBN 13: 9780822546900

Publisher: Lerner Pub Group, 2004

Discusses the changes faced by African Americans after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, describing how families tried to reunite, find homes, and jobs.

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From School Library Journal:

Grade 5-8-This solid, well-organized book clearly examines that period after the close of the Civil War known as Reconstruction. The author seeks to make a complex subject accessible to a young audience and presumes no prior knowledge of the topic. The volume is heavily illustrated with photographs, reproductions, and documents from the 1860s and 1870s on nearly every page. The writing style is straightforward, even plodding, as it recalls the jubilation experienced by the newly freed slaves immediately after the Civil War and the gradual, then rapid descent into a state of near slavery, engineered by the courts, Southern state governments, and, finally, the federal government itself. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and excerpts from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 are included. It's unfortunate that the book is so lacking in passion and comes off as a dry retelling of painful facts. Still, it should be useful for reports. Noralee Frankel's Break Those Chains at Last: African Americans, 1860-1880 (Oxford, 1996) does more to make the period come alive because of its reliance on primary sources, which allows the freed slaves to speak for themselves.
Carol Jones Collins, Columbia High School, Maplewood, NJ
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Gr. 5-8. The People's History series scores again with this introduction to Reconstruction, from the "Day of Jubilee" to the end of the nineteenth century, when it was clear that the ramifications of the slave system would not go quietly. Greene uses historical documents, contemporaneous writings, interviews that preserve dialect and spellings, and her own strong sense of history to show the hopes, disappointments, uncertainties, and dangers that came to African Americans with Reconstruction. The book begins with Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1860 and details both black and white reactions to the new way of life. The most affecting chapter discusses how members of families that had been torn asunder tried to find one another and reorganize during Reconstruction; few were successful. Each page features a sepia-toned photograph. Many of the pictures are quite candid--for example, the photo of a man whose back is deformed by scars from whippings, and a reproduction of a racist cartoon. The Web sites and the lengthy bibliography are strong, but even more helpful are the appended documents: the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Ilene Cooper
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved

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