Well, Foner's Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 is a landmark in the field and even though it is almost thirty years old, it represented a synthesis of so many scholarly trends that it is difficult to supersede it. As Andrew Slap noted in a roundtable discussion in in the September 2015 volume of Civil War History:

By the time Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution appeared in 1988, three successive schools of interpretation (i.e., Dunning, revisionist, and post-revisionist) had benefited from decades of scholarship to create fully developed debates about Reconstruction. What Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, did so well was to finally vanquish the Dunning School while reconciling the revisionists and post-revisionists.

Most of the post-Foner historiography on Reconstruction has been not about challenging Foner, but rather complementing him by pushing the boundaries of "Reconstruction" away from the South or examining categories Foner did not.

Heather Cox Richardson's West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War is an example of the former type of scholarship. While Richardson examines dialectic between North and South in this period, she contends that the evolving picture of the West in the American mentality was a synthesis of the common ground between the two. This thesis builds on her earlier The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North in which she contended that class was one of the chief causes of the downfall of Reconstruction. D. Michael Bottoms, Leslie Schwalm, and Stacey L. Smith have likewise produced recent monographs - An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850–1890, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest, and Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction- that argue for a "greater Reconstruction" in which the period was not just about Northern policy in the defeated Confederacy. Steven Hahn's A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration extends the boundaries of Reconstruction chronologically by examining the issue of black agency and how many black social networks (eg churches, local leaders, and traditions) transected the antebellum and postwar periods. Moreover, Hahn traces how white resistance to Reconstruction was not unique consequence of its specific era, but rooted in long-standing political and social traditions in the South.

Three aspects of Reconstruction that Foner tended to give short shrift were gender, culture, and the actual administration of Reconstruction. Michael W. Fitzgerald's brief synthesis Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South recapitulates a number of points made in Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution but adds insightful chapters on gender and day-to-day politics led to the failures of Reconstruction. Women's Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen's Aid Movement by Carol Faulkner is another recent monograph that focuses attention on the role of white women on the ground in various Reconstruction initiatives. Becoming Free in the Cotton South by Susan Eva O'Donovan is a recent monograph that examines the labor history of Georgia's cotton economy and how it evolved into the New South. Edward J. Blum's Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 like Foner examines the crucial aspect of race in Reconstruction, but how abandoning Reconstruction intersected with religion. Written during the zeitgeist of the Iraq occupation, Gregory P. Downs' After Appomattox foregrounds that Reconstruction was primarily a military affair and that resistance was very much a continuation of the war. Laura F. Edwards's A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights is a fascinating new monograph that seeks to bridge the gap between legal and social history. Much like Hahn and his compatriots expand the chronology of the war and Reconstruction, so too does Edwards as she parses out the long trends of evolving legal and social milieus in this period of American history.

When Michael Perman finished his review of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, he noted:

Ironically, because this synthesis is so successful and thorough, it does raise one unsettling question and leave it unanswered--what is left to be done?

While the post-Foner historiography does show that there still is a great deal of life in Reconstruction as a historical topic, a new synthesis is quite difficult. Foner's shadow is quite long in American studies, and very difficult to escape. Most of the popular histories of Reconstruction such as The Bloody Shirt or The Wars of Reconstruction end up recapitulating much of Foner's arguments. Even monographs like O'Donovan and Richardson's are not so much questioning Foner as supplementing his magnum opus. The very diversity of the post-Foner historiography which covers space and time as well as different analytical lenses makes the job of surpassing Foner with a new comprehensive synthesis that much harder.