![]() Historians have frequently overlooked this critical 12-year period that has had profound impact on life in the United States. Most Americans know very little about the Reconstruction era and its legacy. It was during Reconstruction that a century-long era of racial hierarchy, lynching, white supremacy, and bigotry was established-an era from which this nation has yet to recover. White officials in the North and West similarly rejected racial equality, codified racial discrimination, and occasionally embraced the same tactics of violent racial control seen in the South. Violence, mass lynchings, and lawlessness enabled white Southerners to create a regime of white supremacy and Black disenfranchisement alongside a new economic order that continued to exploit Black labor. Within a decade after the Civil War, Congress began to abandon the promise of assistance to millions of formerly enslaved Black people. In decision after decision, the Court ceded control to the same white Southerners who used terror and violence to stop Black political participation, upheld laws and practices codifying racial hierarchy, and embraced a new constitutional order defined by “states’ rights.” In a series of devastating decisions, the United States Supreme Court blocked Congressional efforts to protect formerly enslaved people. Emboldened Confederate veterans and former enslavers organized a reign of terror that effectively nullified constitutional amendments designed to provide Black people equal protection and the right to vote. White perpetrators of lawless, random violence against formerly enslaved people were almost never held accountable-instead, they frequently were celebrated. The commitment to abolish chattel slavery was not accompanied by a commitment to equal rights or equal protection for African Americans and the hope of Reconstruction quickly became a nightmare of unparalleled violence and oppression.īetween 18, thousands of Black women, men, and children were killed, attacked, sexually assaulted, and terrorized by white mobs and individuals who were shielded from arrest and prosecution. However, it quickly became clear that emancipation in the United States did not mean equality for Black people. The new era of Reconstruction offered great promise and could have radically changed the history of this country. By 1868, over 80 percent of Black men who were eligible to vote had registered, schools for Black children became a priority, and courageous Black leaders overcame enormous obstacles to win elections to public office. Most formerly enslaved people in the United States were remarkably willing to live peacefully with those who had held them in bondage despite the violence they had suffered and the degradation they had endured.Įmancipated Black people put aside their enslavement and embraced education, hard work, faith, and citizenship with extraordinary enthusiasm and devotion. This brief but brilliant book introduces general readers to one of the cornerstones of modern science, four laws that are as integral to the well-educated mind as such great dramatic works as Hamlet or Macbeth.In 1865, after two and a half centuries of brutal enslavement, Black Americans had great hope that emancipation would finally mean real freedom and opportunity. Snow once remarked that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is like never having read a work by Shakespeare. Atkins ranges from the fascinating theory of entropy (revealing how its unstoppable rise constitutes the engine of the universe), through the concept of free energy, and to the brink, and then beyond the brink, of absolute zero.Ĭ.P. ![]() Guiding the reader a step at a time, Atkins begins with Zeroth (so named because the first two laws were well established before scientists realized that a third law, relating to temperature, should precede them-hence the jocular name zeroth), and proceeds through the First, Second, and Third Laws, offering a clear account of concepts such as the availability of work and the conservation of energy. Written by Peter Atkins, one of the worlds leading authorities on thermodynamics, this powerful and compact introduction explains what these four laws are and how they work, using accessible language and virtually no mathematics. They establish fundamental concepts such as temperature and heat, and reveal the arrow of time and even the nature of energy itself. From the sudden expansion of a cloud of gas to the cooling of hot metal, and from the unfurling of a leaf to the course of life itself-everything is moved or restrained by four simple laws. The laws of thermodynamics drive everything that happens in the universe.
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