Motivated by such events as the election of the first African American president of the United States of America, the author focuses on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the resulting segregation of the races. The postscriptum gives a brief picture of several American writers and their fiction during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Jerzy Sobieraj’s research is in the American literature and history of the 19th and 20th centuries with a special focus on the American South. The first Polish monograph about the Ku Klux Klan is among his books. He teaches courses on American literature, culture, and history at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw (Poland). He has also taught Southern fiction at the Universitat Jaume I in Spain. As a recipient of several academic grants, he did research at Brown University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and Vanderbilt University. Professor Sobieraj is currently working on a book-length study of the Civil-War era.

Contents: The Seeds of War: From the Missouri Compromise to Secession – Fighting Slavery: Various Shades of Abolitionism – Lincoln and the Civil War – Black Learning, Land, and Labor in the Reconstruction South – The Invisible Empire: The Short Career of the First Ku Klux Klan and Its Rebirth – Years of Shame: Lynching in the United States from 1880s to the Great War – «Wounded in the House of Our Friends»: Segregation in the Republic – –