Du Bois, in fact, envisioned Black Reconstruction as the first of two consecutive books exploring the history and meaning of democracy for Black people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This omission is especially glaring when considering Du Bois’s personal connection to the war and his decades long efforts to write its history. Footnote 4 In the numerous works analyzing Black Reconstruction, the connections between Reconstruction, as Du Bois historicized it, and World War I have remained unexplored. World War I was a defining moment for the African diaspora, African Americans more specifically, and Du Bois in particular. One of the most significant-and catastrophic-reverberations Du Bois would point to was the First World War. Footnote 2 For the past three decades, the field, owing to the seeds planted by Du Bois, has flourished, exploring the full ramifications of this historical period from multiple vantage points and confirming what Du Bois himself wrote: “Reconstruction was an economic revolution on a mighty scale and with world-wide reverberation” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1995, p. Eric Foner ( Reference Foner2013) rightfully indebts his own work to Du Bois, lauding Black Reconstruction as “one of the landmarks of U.S. The book has served as a touchstone, dating back to John Hope Franklin’s Reconstruction after the Civil War (1961), for revisionist approaches, to the study of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Indeed, Black Reconstruction holds a revered status in academia and beyond. Scholars across the disciplines today certainly validate Du Bois’s assessment. Ever so humble, as he neared completion of the manuscript Du Bois, in a letter to a friend, referred to the book as “my magnum opus” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1934a). Footnote 1 Sixty-seven years old at the time of its publication, Black Reconstruction represented for Du Bois the culmination of a lifetime spent committed to the study of the “race question” and the struggle for Black freedom.
Du Bois, to the contrary, viewed Reconstruction as a bold experiment in multiracial democracy, with Black people the central actors, that came to a tragically premature end. Du Bois challenged the indictment proffered by White historians of Reconstruction as an era of tragic failure that justified the exclusion of African Americans from American political life in the twentieth century. Released in 1935, the book, for its time, constituted a radical reinterpretation of the Civil War and its aftermath by Black America’s foremost intellectual-activist. Du Bois’s many published works of history, none are more towering than Black Reconstruction.
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