Black Reconstruction in America by W. E. B. Du Bois
Published 1935 · 1,000 pages · 250,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction
How hard is Black Reconstruction in America to read?
Black Reconstruction in America scores 40 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Academic historical vocabulary with economic theory, legal terminology, and archival citation.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Scholarly prose with long, carefully argued paragraphs and rhetorical passages of deliberate power.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Sustained historical and economic argument with theoretical frameworks about race, class, and democracy.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- 700 pages of archival evidence, statistical data, and historical argument covering twenty years of American history.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Direct historical argument with clear thesis and supporting evidence; Du Bois states his positions explicitly.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- 'The wages of whiteness' functions as a conceptual symbol, but the book operates through argument rather than symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Du Bois deploys irony against the Dunning School's pretensions to objectivity, but the dominant mode is direct polemic.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- The historical argument reaches clear conclusions; 'The Propaganda of History' delivers an explicit verdict.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Chronological historical narrative with thematic chapters, statistical appendices, and polemical essays.
How Black Reconstruction in America is regarded
Black Reconstruction in America holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.