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Reconstruction
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Originally published 02/15/2018
Right after the Civil War, says Stanford's Richard White, Americans were really hopeful, then reality hit
By the 1870s the gulf between the ideal and the reality had widened considerably and would continue to widen for the rest of the century.
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Originally published 02/07/2018
Here’s what happened when black politicians held power
Study shows how they aided southern blacks during Reconstruction
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Originally published 01/16/2018
The History of Reconstruction’s Third Phase
Allen Carl Guelzo
It’s now being seen as a bourgeois revolution.
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Originally published 01/03/2018
What the Women of Today Can Learn from the Women of the 1860s
Jessica Ziparo
What this historian learned when she began researching the history of the first women to work in large numbers for the federal government.
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Originally published 01/02/2018
White supremacists took over a city – now NC is doing more to remember the deadly attack
The North Carolina government is officially recognizing what historians call the only successful coup d’etat in American history, when white supremacists overthrew the Reconstruction-era government in Wilmington in 1898.
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Originally published 08/16/2017
There Shouldn’t Be any Statues Honoring Robert E. Lee Anywhere
Ed Simon
To remove Confederate memorials is not to white-wash history, far from it. It’s to finally remove the stain which concealed for too many Americans the reasons for why that hideous war was fought.
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Originally published 01/13/2017
President Obama Designates First National Monument Dedicated to Reconstruction
The Reconstruction monument, backed by Eric Foner, includes several sites near Beaufort, S.C., which fell under control of the Union Army in November 1861, and became one of the first places where emancipated slaves voted, bought property and created churches, schools and businesses.
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Originally published 12/14/2016
Eric Foner calls on Obama in the NYT to designate a national monument for Reconstruction
Gregory P. Downs, Eric Foner, Kate Masur
"This is a crucial time to commemorate Reconstruction.”
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Originally published 11/28/2016
It Feels like the Fall of Reconstruction
Manisha Sinha
It seems after every period of extraordinary progress, we witness a complete regression to the forces of reaction.
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Originally published 10/10/2016
Historians call on Obama to create a monument to Reconstruction
Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur
Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur say there’s a perfect place for it … in Beaufort County, SC.
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Originally published 07/22/2016
The Awful History Behind Rep. Steve King’s Obnoxious Claims about “Subgroups” (That is, Blacks)
Scott Eastman
The congressman is drawing on racist gibberish cooked up in the 19th century by a racist who influenced Hitler.
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Originally published 07/13/2016
The Movie About Reconstruction that You Forgot, or Won’t Take Seriously
Michael Todd Landis
It’s the 1999 blockbuster flop, “Wild Wild West,” starring Will Smith that has you rooting for the black officer who bags the Confederate baddies.
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Originally published 03/08/2016
The Civil War and its Persistent Resonance: An Interview with James McPherson
Robin Lindley
The Pulitzer-Prize winning historian discusses the war and its legacy.
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Originally published 01/26/2016
So Hillary believes in the discredited Southern Lost Cause theory? Ridiculous.
Harold Holzer
Her remark that had Lincoln lived the horrors of post-war Reconstruction might have been mitigated doesn't make her an enemy of Reconstruction.
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Originally published 01/22/2016
Five myths about Reconstruction
James W. Loewen
The United States is entering the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, that period after the Civil War when African Americans briefly enjoyed full civil and political rights. Here are five common fallacies that Americans still tell themselves about this formative period.
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Originally published 11/10/2015
The Continuing What-Ifs of Reconstruction
Brooks D. Simpson
A critique of Gordon-Reed’s essay in the Atlantic on the failed hopes of Reconstruction.
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Originally published 10/27/2015
What If Reconstruction Hadn’t Failed?
Annette Gordon-Reed
The pervasiveness of white-supremacist ideology in academia gave license to Jim Crow efforts for decades after the Civil War.
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Originally published 10/23/2015
Eric Foner tells West Virginia audience Reconstruction was a failed noble experiment
Sam Owens
Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and history professor at Columbia University, gave a lecture about Reconstruction at the University of Charleston.
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Originally published 09/13/2015
Ken Burns plans on doing a documentary about Reconstruction by 2020
Alyssa Rosenberg
He even knows what the last words of the documentary will be. “They would head, as the poet Langston Hughes wrote, ‘towards the warmth of other suns.’ ” In all the time Burns has been chronicling American history, that dream hasn’t been accomplished. But the journey continues.
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Originally published 09/11/2015
150 Years Later How Are We Honoring the Memory of Reconstruction? With the Worst Kind of Irony.
Adam Arenson
We’re doing it by reenacting its worst elements, from race-based violence to anti-immigrant fear-mongering.
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Originally published 08/07/2015
A small town in Kansas relishes its history as a refuge for freed blacks
The town was founded in 1877, in the midst of America’s rapid westward expansion, by freed slaves from Kentucky who envisioned a black oasis on the prairie. And every year there's a celebration.
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Originally published 07/03/2015
The Persistence of Myth in Southern Politics and Life
Ron Briley
The notion that the Civil War and Reconstruction were foisted upon a defenseless South by a tyrannical central government retains considerable influence in a Southern ideology of persecution.
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Originally published 05/27/2015
NYT hosts debate including Eric Foner: How Americans should remember Reconstruction
"Reconstruction poses a challenge to Americans’ historical understanding because we prefer stories with happy endings." -- Eric Foner
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Originally published 04/09/2015
Historian argues we have wrongly overlooked the importance of the military occupation of the former Confederacy
Eric Herschthal
Historian Gregory P. Downs says the Southern states ratified the 13th Amendment ending slavery because Andrew Johnson left 100,000 troops there after Appomattox, refusing to end the war until they agreed to end slavery.
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Originally published 03/29/2015
Why Reconstruction Matters
Eric Foner
The post-Civil War era dealt with many of the same issues we grapple with today.
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Originally published 10/25/2013
A Tale Worthy of Poe: The Myth of George Bateson and his Belfry
Jeremy Stern
Why do people still tell the "true" story of George Bateson, the supposed inventor of the belfry coffin?
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Originally published 10/09/2013
New Age Travellers adapting traditional horse-drawn caravans
Modern nomadic groups draw from traditional historical culture while still using technology.
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Originally published 09/25/2013
Meet William Mahone, the Ex-Confederate General Who Built His Political Career on the Black Vote
Kevin M. Levin
Mahone and his Readjuster Party formed a biracial coalition that controlled Virginia for four years in the 1880s.
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Originally published 07/29/2013
Henry Louis Gates Jr.: What Was the Colfax Massacre?
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
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Originally published 07/22/2013
The Roots of White Rage
Carole Emberton
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, white Southerners lashed out with homicidal rage against their former bondsmen.
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Originally published 07/15/2013
Trayvon Martin the Latest Victim of America's Fear of Black Men
Elaine F. Parsons
Today, as under Reconstruction, the idea that fear justifies violence is as dangerous one.
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Originally published 03/26/2013
The Truth Behind '40 Acres and a Mule'
We've all heard the story of the "40 acres and a mule" promise to former slaves. It's a staple of black history lessons, and it's the name of Spike Lee's film company. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government's massive confiscation of private property -- some 400,000 acres -- formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves. What most of us haven't heard is that the idea really was generated by black leaders themselves....
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Originally published 01/11/2013
The Real Origin of America's Gun Culture
Carole Emberton
Replica of a Colt 1851 Navy revolver. Credit: Wiki Commons."I'm here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!,” radio host Alex Jones warned British television journalist Piers Morgan on Monday. Leading the charge to have Morgan deported for voicing his opposition to America’s lax gun control laws, which many believe led to the shooting deaths of twenty children and six adults last month at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Jones attempted to cast Morgan as a modern-day Tory ready to reclaim the United States as Great Britain’s colonial possession. Although Morgan’s Britishness proved an effective prop to Jones’s revolutionary rhetoric, the current debate over gun control owes more to the Civil War Era than the American Revolution.
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Originally published 10/12/2011
Welcome Home, General Grant
Charles Bracelen Flood
Ulysses S. Grant as president. Credit: Wiki Commons.IThis year of 2011, marking the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, gives us an opportunity to see the difference between history as fact and history as perception.No better example of this exists than the life of Ulysses S. Grant. He died in 1885; to the end of the nineteenth century, there was one Ulysses S. Grant, based on fact and seen in that light. During almost all of the twentieth century, he was the subject of various forms of "revisionism." In recent years he is being restored to his rightful place in our history.
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Originally published 01/29/2016
Reconstruction: The Sixth Myth
Jim Loewen
This is the Reconstruction myth the Washington Post wouldn't let me debunk on the grounds no one believed it. Then Hillary showed she did!
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Originally published 12/07/2014
How Two Historians Responded to Racism in Mississippi
Jim Loewen
One wrote a textbook passing along the racist myths of Reconstruction. The other wrote a textbook challenging them.
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Originally published 07/18/2014
The Constitutional Havoc of the Income Tax Amendment
Liberty and Power
Some days back I offered an interpretation of the motives and political economy behind the adoption of the 16th Amendment, noting at the time that it also caused extreme constitutional havoc by altering the relationship between the tariff system and the generation of federal tax revenue. While it is certainly possible to read this as a statement of political aversion to the modern income tax system, my characterization was actually an intended reference to certain very specific constitutional consequences of the income tax amendment that actually have little to do with any personal preferences regarding the validity of progressive income taxation.
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