On the shelf
In three previous books-including the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-nominee Reunion Without Compromise: The South and Reconstruction, 1865-1868-historian Michael Perman, PhD'69, research professor in the humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has focused on Southern politics in the first two decades after the Civil War. In his latest book, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), Perman-who did his graduate work at Chicago with professor emeritus John Hope Franklin-focuses on a later chapter in the region's history, the early 20th-century political campaigns through which 10 Southern states took from African Americans and large numbers of lower-class whites the voting rights they had gained during Reconstruction.

Systematically tracing the disfranchisement campaigns state by state, Perman reveals region-wide patterns and connections. Struggle for Mastery also explores the relationship between disfranchisement and segregation, examines the federal government's apparent acceptance of the disfranchisement effort. and describes the political system that emerged in the wake of the radical alteration of the voting public. -M.R.Y.

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