Alison Clark Efford is Assistant Professor of History at Marquette University. Her 2008 doctoral dissertation won the Friends of the German Historical Institute's Fritz Stern Prize.

• Introduction: naturalized citizens, transnational perspectives, and the arc of reconstruction; 1. The German language of American citizenship; 2. The 'freedom-loving German', 1854–60; 3. Black suffrage as a German cause in Missouri, 1865; 4. Principal rising, 1865–9; 5. Wendepunkt: the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1; 6. The Liberal Republican transition, 1870–2; 7. Class, culture, and the decline of reconstruction, 1870–6; Epilogue: the Great Strike of 1877; Appendix: voting tables; Bibliography.

'A brilliant study in every respect, full of local texture, of importance for the whole story of a key period in US history, and of powerfully rendered transnational crosscurrents. Efford's deep research establishes the dramatic connection of German Americans to freedom struggles in the 1850s and 1860s and to the retreat from such commitments in the waning of Reconstruction, convincingly connecting both with the changing history of the land that immigrants left.' David Roediger, University of Illinois, and co-author of The Production of Difference (2012)