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“By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also “quite incidentally” from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, “the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Living in an age of casual sex, serial commitments, and frequent divorce, we are all in danger of becoming as jaded as anceien regime aristocrats. Does the notion of undying love still have any meaning for us today?”
― Marilyn Yalom, How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance – A Literary and Cultural History Across the Centuries

“Lincoln, who enjoyed less than one year of formal schooling, was essentially self-educated. He read widely in nineteenth-century political economy, including the works of the British apostle of economic liberalism John Stuart Mill and the Americans Henry Carey and Francis Wayland. Although these writers differed on specific policies—Carey was among the most prominent advocates of a high tariff while Wayland favored free trade—all extolled the virtues of entrepreneurship and technological improvement in a modernizing market economy. (Wayland, the president of Brown University and a polymath who published works on ethics, religion, and philosophy, made no direct reference to slavery in his 400-page tome, Elements of Political Economy, but did insist that people did not work productively unless allowed to benefit from their own labor, an argument Lincoln would reiterate in the 1850s.)”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Black troops helped construct schools, churches, and orphanages, organized debating societies, and held political gatherings where “freedom songs” were sung and soldiers delivered “speeches of the most inflammatory kind.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877