How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, react to their newly won freedoms? Building on, criticizing and extending previous historical accounts of the Reconstruction, David Roediger's radical new history finds fresh sources and texts that redefine the idea of freedom after the jubilee. Reinstating ex-slaves' own "freedom dreams" in constructing these histories, Roediger creates a masterful account of the emancipation, and its ramifications on a whole host of day-to-day concerns for whites and black alike, such as property relations, labor, and gender roles.

David Roediger is Kendrick Babcock Chair of History at the University of Illinois. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. He is the editor of Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, The North and Slavery and Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White as well as a new edition of Covington Hall’s Labor Struggles in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Against the Current, Radical History Review, History Workshop Journal, The Progressive and Tennis.