The key to Reconstruction for both blacks and whites was black suffrage. On one hand this vote made possible the elevation of black political leaders to positions of prominence in the reorganization of the South after the Civil War. For southern whites, on the other hand, black participation in the Reconstruction governments discredited the positive accomplishments of those regimes and led to the evolution of a systematized white rejection of the black as a positive force in southern politics. For white contemporaries and subsequent historians, the black political leader became the exemplar of all that was reprehensible about the period. Stereotyped patterns, developed to eliminate black influence, prevented any examination of the actual role played by these men in the reconstruction process. This study is partially a synthesis of recent scholarly research on specific aspects of the black political role and the careers of individual political leaders. Additional research included examination of a number of manuscript collections in the Library of Congress and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, state and federal government documents, and contemporary newspapers. On the basis of all these sources, this study evaluates the nature of black political leadership and its impact …

While personal accounts and interpretive overviews have been written about the allied invasion and occupation of Italy during World War II, this study is the first to utilize recently published American Foreign Relations volumes dealing with the wartime conferences. Organized into five chapters, the study surveys allied conferences leading to the invasion of Italy, Italian political developments during occupation, and allied relief and rehabilitation efforts. The conclusions are that Churchill, while correct in .assessing Italy's strategic value, undermined his own policy through political meddling and a desire for revenge. In combination with Roosevelt, whose interest in Italy was political and at best marginal, Churchill needlessly delayed stabilization of Italian economic and political conditions.