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====Reconstruction as Revolution====
[[File:Eric_Foner.jpg|thumbnail|left|250ps|Eric Foner in 2009]]
Eric Foner regards Reconstruction as a truly revolutionary period. Foner’s work, ''Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877'' focuses on four main themes concerning the evolution of the Reconstruction Period. ''Reconstruction'' aimed to provide a coherent synthesis combining recent scholarship along with Foner’s conclusions to produce a comprehensive contemporary interpretation of the Reconstruction period.
Both historians view Reconstruction as a failure in two respects: the inability to guarantee freedmen their rights and the retardation of the Southern economy. However, while the political violence in the South (KKK) along with legislation of black codes and Jim Crow laws severely curtailed the rights of freedmen, lasting constitutional adjustments did lay the groundwork for future battles. The Reconstruction amendments did allow for African Americans to claim freedoms that were rightfully theirs with the gradual successes of the Civil Rights movement. The failure of Reconstruction resulted from several factors besides the two already mentioned. Foner points to the North’s new fascination with industrialization and labor conflict. The economics of which would shift the country’s attention away from the Reconstruction experience.
For all its failures, even Foner acknowledges the importance of Reconstruction in establishing the possibility for a more just America, “the institutions created or consolidated after the Civil War – the black family, school, and church – provided the base from which the modern civil rights revolution sprang. And for its legal strategy, the movement returned to the laws and amendments of Reconstruction.” Like Foner, Kolchin points out similar features of Post-Reconstruction America, “Even as blacks became the objects of intensified racial oppression, they struggled to remake their lives as free men and women and succeeded to a remarkable degree in their efforts to secure greater independence for themselves … In assessing these developments, the question of perspective remains critical: the South of 1910 was hardly the South they would have chosen … but it was far removed from the South of 1860”
====Conclusion====
