With After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, editors Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly return to W. E. B. Du Bois's “insistence on understanding Reconstruction as a critical chapter in the history of the American working class” (8, original emphasis). While not eschewing the current trend toward globalizing the era, they demonstrate that “critical insights can be gleaned from close study at the local level” (5). The editors foresee not a new synthesis but a shattering of “the distractions imposed by the debate over Dunning,” who kept focus on party politics. Noting the diversity of experiences throughout the South, they confess that the essays in this collection “do not necessarily speak to a single shared theme” (9), but, as a whole, they note that common themes emerge, such as the conflict between capital and labor and the circumscribed means through which freedmen could assert their own will. For the individuals under Reconstruction, their responses flowed directly from the immediate past of slavery and warfare and merged with the dislocation of free labor and membership in an American nation.

Slavery, for instance, cannot help but echo through these essays in the continuity of such problems as the integrity of black families, control of labor and capital, and white fears of black insurrection. Families figure in the essays of Erik Mathisen and J. Michael Rhyne, both of whom describe battles between former masters, Freedman's Bureau agents, and black parents for authority over black children in Mississippi and Kentucky. While the growing political action of African Americans runs throughout the volume, James Illingsworth, Susan Eva O'Donovan, and Kelly all address the ways in which such consciousness flowed from awareness of the economic power and organization of labor and especially from alliances between rural and urban workers in Louisiana and both Carolinas. Jonathan Bryant and, to a lesser extent, Mathisen demonstrate that whites in Mississippi and Georgia interpreted those assertive actions on the part of black workers as an insurrection and responded as they would to a rebellion.

The effects of the war also shaped postwar conflicts. Illingsworth points out that returning Confederate war veterans led the opposition to black mobilization, which was itself led by veterans of the US Colored Troops. Michael Fitzgerald shows how the sons of Alabama slaveholders had lost much of their wealth and status when their human property became free, and they turned their rage on the former slaves with terrorist organizations. The rhetoric of states' rights to which secessionists had resorted before and during the war continued among former Confederates as African Americans required federal power to enforce federal law and federal funding to support federal agencies that mitigated the dislocations of warfare and slavery. Yet, as Downs demonstrates in his study of North Carolina, the weaknesses of the Freedman's Bureau underscore the essential antipathy of the Republican Party toward the working class and African Americans. Bruce Baker's essay on distillers and drovers in a largely white but anti-secessionist, reluctantly Confederate, and poor section of South Carolina also addresses the Republicans' aversion to concerns facing the working class, resulting in their failure to create a coalition of poor whites and African Americans.

Baker and Kelley bookend this collection with essays from Thomas Holt and Eric Foner, each of whom provides different methods of contextualizing the volume. In his “Afterword,” Foner notes the leaps that historians have made in access and interpretation since the publication of his own study and concedes “what might be called a Long Reconstruction” (224), one beginning before the first shots at Fort Sumter, extending beyond its official end in 1877, and encompassing a broad range of relationships and experiences. Holt's opening essay, however, might be required reading for freshman who complain about the need to study history. Holt addresses the ways that the present and the past inform one another, making the strongest argument for the immediacy of Reconstruction. He not only addresses the ways in which these local studies fit into global movements of rising nation-states, labor emancipation, and developing concepts of citizenship, but also draws parallels between the struggles of freedmen for humanity and membership in the American nation over a century and a half ago and the overwhelming presence of noncitizens in the laboring classes today, stripped of both rights and humanity. This collection provides not only a valuable contribution in reconceptualizing the American South between 1866 and 1877, but, as Holt and the editors imply, can add depth to the shallows of the nightly news.