Listening to W E B Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America as an audiobook

I don’t know what I was expecting (something nebulously classic, I guess) but it absolutely lives up to the reputation. He was definitely a data guy, able to amass lots of supporting/relevant facts, and weave them into the broad themes he communicates.

As an example, he talks about the decades immediately before the civil war, and gives a big list of all the states that outlawed voting among free Blacks. Like, they didn’t think (they needed) to make it illegal initially, so there really weren’t laws to this effect in the early 1800s. But somehow it entered the US consciousness, and a bunch of states did very similar things in a short time period.

In northern states (I believe NY in particular sticks out), it was sometimes made illegal and then legalized again repeatedly.

I dunno. It’s just interesting to read about civil war/reconstruction in its actual historical context. Not this “well the US is good now and therefore must have been the result of a series of increasingly more just decisions”. Nah bitch this the empire of slavery, this thing’s layers of fucked up social relations fighting for a stable configuration (which generally included a lower class of essentially non-citizens)

But also, he doesn’t really do too much grandstanding either (some good jabs here and there), it’s generally just sequences of facts and some very easy follow-up conclusions, in light of said facts.