The Second Founding
How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
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The Second Founding
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Narrated by:
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Donald Corren
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By:
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Eric Foner
About this listen
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation's foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.
The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States.
Eric Foner's compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre-Civil War mass meetings of African-American "colored citizens" and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late 19th century. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. The Jim Crow system was the result.
Again today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights.
©2019 Eric Foner (P)2019 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about The Second Founding
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- mr t a graham
- 11-07-20
Such a timely read
One of the USA's best historians gives a consise and clear understanding of reconstruction and the constitutional ammendments that are in debate today with the BLM movement. The author sets out reconstructions positives and negatives really well. Read really well.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Alex
- 06-05-21
Generally decent account by an extreme left-winger
This book describes the political battles that ensued after the Civil War in America, where there was a fight to ensure fair treatment for the former slaves with three Reconstruction amendments, which guaranteed freedom, equal treatment, and franchise respectively. One chapter is dedicated to each of the three Reconstruction amendments, and we get an overview of how the legal decision-making evolved through the 19th century. Not much bad can be said about these chapters, and Foner is highly regarded for his historical analyses.
However, in this book, Foner constantly injects his own personal opinions, which universally skew in one direction, and not a moderate one at that. This becomes clear in the introduction, where he absurdly equates post-Reconstruction policies which denied blacks the right to vote with modern-day policies which require identification before one is allowed to vote. He seems to have some understanding of the rest of the world, as he does point out that the US is one of the few countries that has birthright citizenship, but this knowledge suddenly disappears when it comes to Photo ID - which is close to universal outside the US.
When whites invoke the 14th amendment, he remarks that this is "ironic" (because it was intended to improve the lot of blacks) because it was not used for the people for whom it was originally intended, but he also complains when the Supreme Court did not sufficiently apply it to women and other minorities who are deserving of equal treatment in the author's opinion.
Court decisions are not evaluated based on the legal merits, but based on whether or not they effected the policy outcomes that Foner likes. Of one of the decisions of Oliver Wendell Holmes, he says that it should be a black stain on his record based on no more evidence than the fact that Foner did not like the effects of the decision.
Discriminatory policies which have effects that Foner welcomes are labeled as 'race-conscious' policies, and he complains when such policies are struck down because they discriminate - again, without any legal reasoning to back it up besides his personal policy preferences. Basically, this is a historical work wrapped around an analysis that reeks of critical race theory.
When one knows sufficiently to disregard the latter, it is decent. For people who are interested in an introduction to Reconstruction, the work by Allen Guelzo is far less biased and tainted by presentism.;
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