If these essays are anything to go by, the shadow of Eric Foner still falls on much of the scholarship now being done on the Reconstruction era - although I should also say that this collection ultimately emerges from out of that shadow and provides some vibrant, fresh and exciting possibilities for the future. Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution appeared in 1988, and twenty years on is still the most recognisable landmark in Reconstruction historiography: as Thomas Brown states in the introduction, this volume “examines the directions that scholarship has taken in the years since the appearance of Foner’s synthesis.” (5). The collection’s subtitle could well have been ‘New Perspectives on New Perspectives’, as each essay is essentially a comprehensive, sometimes masterfully arranged account of (mostly) post-Foner Reconstruction scholarship in several key - and some surprising - thematic areas.

Stephen West examines that old stalwart of Reconstruction histories, the links between economy and race, with John Rodrigue providing a useful complement to this in his essay on black agency and slavery: both cover some familiar ground - West is particularly aware of the continuing influence of C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South (1951) - but do so with an astute understanding of the directions current scholarship is taking. More unusual, perhaps, is Heather Cox Richardson’s account of Reconstruction in the North and West - it is, in fact, one of this collection’s high points, and indicates the intriguing new pathways that such a collection can forge. Mark Smith, similarly, taps into one of American Studies’ recent trends in his essay on the transnational and global implications of Reconstruction, making interesting use of Amy Kaplan’s seminal The Anarchy of Empire (2003). Leslie Butler charts the course of intellectual and cultural history, using George Frederickson’s The Inner Civil War (1993) to anchor a richly researched essay. Michael Vornberg argues for a closer understanding between constitutional and legal history, specifically the impact of the Civil War on these things, and Thomas Brown’s concluding essay tackles another academic favourite of the moment, cultural memory. As this brief roll-call suggests, a huge range of ground is covered here, some of it in territory familiar to Reconstruction historians but much of it showing the original and suggestive ways that current scholarship may be taking.

In fact, that word ‘suggestive’ may be the key note to the whole collection. “The purpose of the volume is more to offer suggestions than to draw conclusions,” the introduction tells us, and in this respect it does not disappoint. This is an essential port of call for current academics and teachers, but perhaps even more vitally it offers a huge range of potential new areas of fruitful research for those moving into the field for the first time. Graduate students groping around for original PhD ideas could do a lot worse than start here. It serves, finally, to move Reconstruction scholarship into a more expansive place, a place where the issues at stake are central to American historical scholarship as a whole. As Heather Cox Richardson states, “We are increasingly looking at the late nineteenth century as the period in which America constructed itself into a new nation after the bloody Civil War, deciding what America would stand for and who would be a welcome participant in that nation.” (69): the essays collected here are a significant contribution to these crucial, abiding issues.