The Great Task Remaining Before Us: Reconstruction As America's Continuing Civil War

"This fine collection demonstrates that the field of Reconstruction history is alive and flourshing, and that a new generation of scholars is bringing fresh insights to this most controversial era of the American past."---Eric Foner

"An unusually strong collection of essays ...the scholarship is impeccable."---Gaines M. Foster, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

"This is an important volume that should be read by everyone interested in nineteenth-century America. Editors Cimbala and Miller have assembled an outstanding collection of essays that examine the post-Civil War years from a wide array of vantage points while sharing a common theme: that Reconstruction was in many respects a continuation of the war."---Stephen V. Ash, University of Tennessee, author of A Year in the South: 1865

"This collection of sound, thoughtful essays provides an extensive examination of this significant and complex period of U.S. history. A must-read for anyone examining Reconstruction, this book shows that the `great task' still remains before us."---Orville Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Lincoln

Through informative case studies, this illuminating book remaps considerations of the Civil War and Reconstruction era by charting the ways in which the needs, interests, and experiences of going to war, fighting it, and making sense of it informed and directed politics, public life, social change, and cultural memory after the war's end. In doing so, it shows that "the war" did not actually end with Lee's surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln's assassination in Washington. As the contributors show, major issues remained, including: defining "freedom"; rebuilding the South; integrating women and blacks into postwar society, culture, and polities; deciding the place of the military in public life; demobilizing or redeploying soldiers; organizing a new party system; and determining the scope and meanings of "union."

Paul A. Cimbala is Professor of History at Fordham University and editor of the Press's series The North's Civil War and Reconstructing America.
Randall M. Miller is Professor of History and holder of the William Dirk Warren Sesquicentennial Chair at Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia.