The Book Report Series: Highlights of some very great books about American history. A list of books everyone should have in their libraries. Charged with the mandate to change the southern racial “status quo” in education, civil rights, and labor, the Freedmen’s Bureau was an extraordinary agency established by Congress in 1865. The ultimate ineffectiveness of the Bureau in Georgia and other southern states has often been blamed on the racism of it’s northern administrators, but Author Paul A. Cimbala finds the explanation to be much more complex. In this remarkably balanced account, he blames the failure on a combination of the Bureau’s northern free-labor ideology, limited resources, and temporary nature— as well as deeply rooted white southern hostility toward change. Because of these factors, the Bureau in practice left freedpeople and ex-masters to create their own new social, political, and economic arrangements. — PAUL A. CIMBALA is a professor of history at Fordham University. His many books include “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations” which he coedited.

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