Blight charts the course by which Southerners waged a "propaganda war" for the memory of Reconstruction and the Civil War. This is a thoroughly researched study on the conscious struggle to control collective memory, one fought by both Blacks and whites, but ultimately won by whites until the Civil Rights Movement and many would argue, beyond.

Du Bois—the first Black man to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University—sought to turn the dominant historiographical school on its head while using much of their research work for his own sources (as a Black man, he wasn't admitted into most manuscript archives at the time). The work weaves a credible narrative that presents Black people as human beings, neither inherently inferior nor superior, but exhibiting instances of intelligence as well as ignorance.

This renowned work introduces readers to a postwar era that greatly influenced both Blacks and whites by shaping racial attitudes that still affect our country today.

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize, this exhaustive study catalogs modern Black political traditions and communities as they emerged out of slavery. Hahn reinterprets traditional notions of what constitutes political involvement and action, and the result is a history that emphasizes the direct action and initiative of Black people, rather than their previous portrayals as submissive or dependent figures.

Litwack was one of the first historians to carefully examine the aftermath of the Civil War from a Black perspective, utilizing the invaluable interviews conducted by the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression, but also an exhaustive list of accounts from newspapers, letters, and transcribed testimony from both whites and Blacks.

This isn't a comprehensive work on the various aspects of Reconstruction, but it's a very good summary of the revisionist scholarship that approached the time period from a radically new perspective in the context of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s. Stampp includes critiques of the old "Dunning school" of racist historiography, but also of the first revisionist, W.E.B. Du Bois.

This is an impressive primary-source collection of diaries, oral histories, letters, and autobiographies of Black women from 1800 to the 1880s, compiled by the former curator of the Research Collection at Howard University.

Vann Woodward charts the specific circumstances under which the southern states embarked on a radically new course of leadership, government, and social structure that ultimately coalesced into the modern South of the early-20th century. Yet he traces the significant commonalities between the states and their broader connections to the distribution of power in American government at all levels, as well as the influence of business interests and the propertied classes on the ultimate composition and orientation of Southern governments.