This book covers such an important time period in our history. As a high school social studies teacher, I make sure to emphasize this time where if the country stayed on the same trajectory, we would be so much closer to racial equality. This book is so important to our times and understanding of our own history. I have used is many times in my classroom.

I had high hopes for this book [enough that I was willing to overlook his previous indiscretion in book writing, though had I known that going in, I probably would not have requested this] and to be fair, the beginning of each chapter was really good [and that is the ONLY reason this is getting 3 stars].. It was when you got to the middle of each [extremely long] chapter, that things go south. It becomes very dry and boring and more than once I nodded off while trying to read the chapter. I learned some new things and that was cool, but mostly, I had to make myself pick this up every day to read it. This is an important subject and while the author did have some really good things to say and some excellent insight, most of the book dragged and was really difficult to complete. Most of it felt like a really dry textbook and this subject deserves more and better than that.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin Press for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A little history lesson on the focus of this book:
The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery and servitude.
The 14th Amendment granted citizenship born or naturalized in the United States which included slaves and recently freed slaves.
The 15th Amendment gives any US citizen the right to vote regardless of race, color or previous condition to servitude.

Pretty intense ideas? Absolutely and this is the focus on the book and how these concepts have declined and improved throughout the years since their creation. I find this quite relevant to what is happening in the US today with all the protests and the scary riots. I find it disgusting that race is still an issue 200+ years later and that it will continue to be. How can there be equality when there is such injustice and treatment of someone based on their skin.? A person is still a person.

The author obviously did a lot of research for this book. But there is a lot opinions and sensitive subjects throughout this book. There are better books about race and inequality to this but it is nice to see someone tracing racism back to the Constitution. Definitely thought provoking. Just an ok read for me.

Thanks to Netgalley, the author and St Martin's Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Available: 10/20/20

Michael A. Bellesiles (October 2020). Inventing Equality: Reconstructing the Constitution in the aftermath of the Civil War. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Inventing Equality is a frustrating book to read, not due to the author’s writing, but to the subject matter. The publisher highlights the author’s focus on the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments; the author additionally explores in depth the priorities of the American public and the political parties that evolved over time to address their needs. While never made explicit, the description of actions by Democrats, Republicans, Supreme Court justices, and Presidents supports the argument that relatively little has changed in the years since the Reconstruction era. The same political machinations keep grinding away to limit identifiable aspects of a democratically based government. To present, as the author does, a spotlight on “inventing equality,” he has created a project with no clear beginning and end, no clear heroes (although the actions of specific individuals at certain points approach our current understanding of equality), and a massive collection of villains.

The author recognizes that any history of equality within the United States must account for the language of the Constitution and its amendments. Bellesiles devotes time to a close examination of the processes that produced the Constitution, although many other texts provide a deeper dive into major themes. The author instead maintains a tight focus on key events surrounding the Civil War, when the stability if not the survival of the United States was under intense challenge. While I have quibbles with a few aspects of later chapters (especially the author’s look at social Darwinism), I recommend the book to the reader who is interested in the Reconstruction period and an important slice of the political intrigues and battles that slowly, all too slowly, expanded the country’s willingness to consider let alone promote equality among citizens. Readers interested in the equality theme will come away informed if their interest is mainly historical (who did what and when).