My rating:
add to my books
Loading...
Redemption
A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away.Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Co...more
Audio CD, 0 pages
Published
October 5th 2006
by Tantor Media, Inc.
(first published 2006)
There is a good chance some of your friends read this book. Sign in to see!
sign in »
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
This book is currently not featured on any Listopia lists.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
159)
Reading this book is like taking bitter medicine. It's good for you, but not pleasant. I had the same feeling at the beginning of this book as when I began Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee; which was, "This isn't not going to end well."
The book is about the post Civil War reconstruction era. This is a dark chapter of American history, but not for the reasons I was taught in school. I don't remember much of the specific facts that I was taught, but I remember picking up the...more
The book is about the post Civil War reconstruction era. This is a dark chapter of American history, but not for the reasons I was taught in school. I don't remember much of the specific facts that I was taught, but I remember picking up the...more
Lemann's brief but compelling description of the depressing last years of Reconstruction depicts an organized campaign of political violence aimed squarely at depriving freed slaves of their 15th Amendment rights, which guaranteed them the right to vote. Armed Democrats, almost always Confederate veterans, typically descended on Republican rallies (believe it or not, African-Americans were exclusively Republican in those days), created a pretext for violence, and began shooting. After the former...more
After the Civil War the Constitution was amended to establish equal political and civil rights for former slaves, and for the first few year blacks had some real political power. For example in Mississippi 64 of 152 state legislators were black in 1873. Mississippi voters had elected a man sympathetic to Reconstruction as governor: Adelbert Ames, a former Union General recently arrived from Maine. However, many whites didn’t like the new arrangements, and with the Union Army largely with...more
view 1 comment
This book tells the story of the end of Reconstruction and the establishment of the Jim Crow era in the South. I found the subject matter very interesting, as this is a subject that I didn't learn much about in school, and that isn't normally covered in depth in other books. It would have been better if the author hadn't concentrated so exclusively on the two counties that had discussed in the book (for which he had solid primary sources), but rather developed some comparisons between these co...more
This is an amazing account of the bloody events that occurred in the deep South during the years after the Civil War -- a period called Reconstruction by historians, but called "redemption" by southerners. The book focuses in part on the story of Adelbert Ames, a civil war hero from Hampden, Maine who becomes governor of Mississippi, only to be disgraced and chased out by rabidly racist and blood-hungry locals. Overall, the book makes it pretty clear to me that the South essentially wo...more
A great book about the time after the Civil War that so many school books and the media tend to forget. A book every American should read so that they learn just how long it took for our "great" country to come to the level where everyone was considered equal and free. It's sad how teachers and scholars have skipped over the trials and tragedies that African Americans have experienced in our country, but this book is a good start for the average adult reader to discover the world we kn...more
There are a manageable number of reviews for this sparsely read (by GR people) book. Redemption Reviews A reading of those reviews will quickly give you a sense of the content here. If you are looking for literature, you will not find David McCullough in Nicholas Lemann. But as a non-historian, I find that nonfiction histories rarely immerse you in the time and place. While Redemption is not riveting, it is well researched and has 45 pages of Notes and Index as well as source references througho...more
I read Lemann's "The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America" a while ago. It was dry, but good information. I have always wanted to find a good book about the reconstruction period after the civil war. I'm hoping this is a good book, but concerned that its only 200 pages
UPDATE:
Well Lemann is still dry as the desert, but still this was a emotionally bitter book to read. Reconstruction was suppossed to usher former slaves into full Am...more
UPDATE:
Well Lemann is still dry as the desert, but still this was a emotionally bitter book to read. Reconstruction was suppossed to usher former slaves into full Am...more
I was drawn to this primarily because it's about my great-great-grandfather Adelbert Ames and his tenure as governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction; he had been the subject of a short, unfavorable mention in Profiles in Courage, which the family tried to correct without success, and Lemann, I think, was trying to do what Kennedy wouldn't. (Kennedy wrote favorably about L.Q.C. Lamar, a white Democratic Mississippi politician of the 1870s and '80s who was instrumental in ending Reconstructio...more
This non-fiction is a must read for anyone that wants to understand the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War and how badly Reconstruction was handled by the newly reunified country. Lemann relates example after example of the atrocities perpetrated by the angry white southerners after the end the war, so many that you think you can't stand to read more about man's inhumanity to man. Lemann does a good job of portraying the attitudes and thinking of the time and debunks the myth that so...more
A tremendous disappointment. As in the case of much present day narrative the tendency is to establish white hats and black hats in the character studies. Lemann goes well beyond the pale, even imagining the oily Benjamin F. Butler as a saintly person, and otherwise engaging in an astonishing amount of hyperbole. The story of Mississippi 1873-75 is rather more complex than Lemann paints it, I'm afraid.
One of the only books that's ever made me blood-boilingly angry as I was reading it. It's easy to greet the end of Congressional Reconstruction with a shrug of inevitability; Lemann shows exactly what could have been accomplished, and why we instead got Jim Crow.
Somewhat aimless-feeling and hard to follow, but well worth reading. The atrocities it recounts should not be forgotten by history.
Terrifying. Reconstruction seems an unfinished project.
I'm fascinated by the changes that occurred during Reconstruction. The government supported support of newly freed slaves and their political movements. Just as fascinating is the Republican decision to abandon them in favor of votes for Rutherford B. Hayes. This book has interesting material about the racial violence in Miss, LA, and other southern states...but, it is bogged down by bad writing and by the end you just want to throw it across the room.
What gives, America? Get it together. This is quick account of Reconstruction in the Deep South, when the Democratic party basically became a wing of the Klan, like Sinn Fein except with power.
Distracted reading over Christmas break. Journalistic take on one slice of reconstruction. Glaring error on page one is the main point that lingers...
A good argument for the revision of the longstanding view regarding reconstruction as overly harsh and the cause of its own demise.
Great story, important history, but unfortunately not particularly well written or interesting in this telling.
Importance of the subject matter rates 5 stars, the execution rates 3.
Just started, but the prologue has me hooked!
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
