A long — very long — book, but more than worth it if you want to understand the centrality of the black freedom struggle to American democracy. First published in 1935, Black Reconstruction chronicles, with great rhetorical flourish, the story of the post–Civil War Reconstruction era, when free black men won the right to vote, African Americans attained positions in elected office, and legislatures set about constructing schools and hospitals for all. Du Bois overturned decades of racist scholarship that had insisted Reconstruction legislatures were irredeemably corrupt and that black Americans were unable to govern themselves. And Du Bois showed, as Robert Greene II notes in his write-up of the book for Jacobin, that “forging a radical democracy requires combating both racism and the degradations of capitalism.”