This book explores and analyzes the problems and challenges that have resulted from the Civil War, Reconstruction, slavery, and segregation in North America. These painful chapters in American history have continued along racial and regional lines and are of particular interest today when the USA are for the first time governed by an African American president. The postscriptum extends the main narrative by focusing on selected writers’ activities and 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.