"Foner has established himself as the leading authority on the Reconstruction period," wrote historian Michael Perman in reviewing "Reconstruction". "This book is not simply a distillation of the secondary literature; it is a masterly account – broad in scope as well as rich in detail and insight. "This is history written on a grand scale, a masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history," David Herbert Donald wrote in "The New Republic". C. Vann Woodward, in "The New York Review of Books", wrote, "Eric Foner has put together this terrible story with greater cogency and power, I believe, than has been brought to the subject heretofore."