¹ W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935), ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

² See, e.g., Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); José Itzigsohn and Karida Brown, The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line (New York: New York University Press, 2020), chap. 2.

³ See, e.g., Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov, Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Francis, Megan Ming, “The Strange Fruit of American Political Development,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6, no. 1 (2018): 128–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2017.1420551CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Daniel J. Galvin, “Qualitative Methods and American Political Development,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert C. Lieberman (Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697915.001.0001.

⁵ Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 4.

⁶ Suzanne Mettler and Richard Valelly, “Introduction: The Distinctiveness and Necessity of American Political Development,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert C. Lieberman (Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697915.013.21.

⁷ Theda Skocpol, “Analyzing American Political Development as It Happens,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert C. Lieberman (Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697915.013.22. The analysis of timing, sequence, and institutional contexts in Black Reconstruction is self-evident. While not using the same conceptual language, Du Bois analyzes policy feedback in at least two ways. First, his case studies attend closely to how Reconstruction policies (such as land reform and tax policies) mobilized interests and restructured the relative political power of different groups. Second, his chapter on education reform during Reconstruction underscores that policy outcomes in this domain shaped the terms of racial politics in subsequent periods.

⁸ Joseph E. Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian T. Warren, “Introduction: Race and American Political Development,” in Race and American Political Development, ed. Joseph E. Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian T. Warren (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–30.

⁹ An exception is in Brandwein's chapter on the revolutionary character of Reconstruction. The chapter's main interlocutors are Eric Foner, Bruce Ackerman, and Hannah Arendt, but it does engage with Du Bois's account as well. See Pamela Brandwein, “Reconstruction, Race, and Revolution,” in Race and American Political Development, ed. Joseph E. Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian T. Warren (New York: Routledge, 2012), 136–65.

¹⁰ Across these three journals, the citation count by decade is one in the 1980s, four in the 1990s, one in the 2000s, four in the 2010s, and five in the 2020s (as of March 30, 2022).

¹¹ See, e.g., Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Balfour, Lawrie, “Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 33–44, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055403000509CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Juliet Hooker, “‘To See, Foresee, and Prophesy’: Du Bois's Mulatto Fictions and Afro-Futurism,” in Theorizing Race in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190633691.003.0004; Ella Myers, “Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion,” Political Theory 47, no. 1 (2019): 6–31, https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718791744.

¹² To estimate the number of citations to Black Reconstruction in political science journals, I downloaded citation data from the Google Scholar index using Harzing's Publish or Perish software and cross-referenced the results with a list of 313 political science journals compiled by Resul Umit. From 1980 to 2007, the citation count was four or fewer each year; from 2008 to 2019, it was ten or fewer each year. The count rose to fifteen in 2020 and twenty-six in 2021 (as of October 25, 2021). The political science journal that cites the book most often is Perspectives on Politics, with a total count of fourteen citations (half of these are from 2018 onward). Due to issues with the Google Scholar Index, these are likely slight undercounts; see Jerry E. Gray et al., “Scholarish: Google Scholar and Its Value to the Sciences,” Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship (Summer 2012), https://doi.org/10.5062/F4MK69T9. For the software used, see Anne-Wil Harzing, Publish or Perish (2007), https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish; Resul Umit, psjournals (2021), https://github.com/resulumit/psjournals.

¹³ Some notable exceptions are Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Pamela Brandwein, Reconstructing Reconstruction: The Supreme Court and the Production of Historical Truth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Pamela Brandwein, Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Johnson, Kimberley S., “Racial Orders, Congress, and the Agricultural Welfare State, 1865–1940,” Studies in American Political Development 25, no. 2 (2011): 143–61, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X11000095CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pavithra Suryanarayan and Steven White, “Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in the American South,” American Political Science Review 115, no. 2 (2020): 568–84, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000933; Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins, Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck, Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); Herron, Paul E., “‘This Crisis of Our History’: The Colored Conventions Movement and the Temporal Construction of Southern Politics,” Studies in American Political Development 36, no. 1 (2022): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X21000122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Richard Valelly, “How Suffrage Politics Made—and Makes—America,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert C. Lieberman (Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016); Kimberley S. Johnson, “The Color Line and the State,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert C. Lieberman, (Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697915.013.009.

¹⁵ As Bateman puts it, “the story of progressive democracy is a powerful political myth” that elicits “amnesia” about recurring patterns of disenfranchisement; see David A. Bateman, Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3.

¹⁶ Valelly pursues this kind of comparison between Reconstruction and the 1950s–60s, focusing on suffrage extension; see Valelly, The Two Reconstructions. Du Bois's broad conception of democracy also opens up avenues for comparison of other outcomes including constitutional reform, policy developments, and institutional change.

¹⁷ For an example of such comparison, see Francis, Megan Ming, “Can Black Lives Matter within U.S. Democracy?” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 699, no. 1 (2022): 186–99, https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162221078340CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Foner, Eric, “Black Reconstruction: An Introduction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 3 (2013): 409–18, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2146368CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For early reviews by Black scholars, see L. D. Reddick, “A New Interpretation for Negro History,” The Journal of Negro History 22, no. 1 (1937): 17–28, https://doi.org/10.2307/2714314; Beale, Howard K., “On Rewriting Reconstruction History,” The American Historical Review 45, no. 4 (1940): 807–27, https://doi.org/10.2307/1854452CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Franklin, John Hope, “Whither Reconstruction Historiography?” The Journal of Negro Education 17, no. 4 (1948): 446–61, https://doi.org/10.2307/2966233CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Foner, “Black Reconstruction”; Walden, Daniel, “W.E.B. Du Bois: Pioneer Reconstruction Historian,” Negro History Bulletin 26, no. 5 (1963): 159–64Google Scholar; Cedric Robinson, “A Critique of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction,” The Black Scholar 8, no. 7 (1977): 44–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1977.11413913.

²⁰ For a sampling of such work, see the symposium in South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 3 (2013).

²¹ See, e.g., Itzigsohn and Brown, The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois; Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015).