Skip to main content

Black Reconstruction in the South

By


This is black history month, and it only seems fitting that Douglas Egerton's new book, The Wars of Reconstruction is now available.  I wasn't quite sure what to think of it with all the praise being heaped on it by the Wall Street Journal, but Eric Foner gives this book a big thumb up, so that seals the deal for me.

Egerton focuses mostly at the state and local level in the South, illustrating the gains that were made during Reconstruction.  He contrasts this with the violent reactionary elements such as the Ku Klux Klan, ultimately showing that Reconstruction was not a failure, but rather was violently overthrown.

This of course was not the long held view, which Foner focused on his excellent book on Reconstruction.  He, along with Leon Litwack rescued Reconstruction from the dust bin of history, by drawing from the seminal work of W.E.B. DuBois and other prime sources to counter the long prevailing Dunning school of thought on the subject, which rendered Reconstruction a failure.

Still, it seems many see Reconstruction as an unwanted and unneeded imposition on the South, with many Southerners still idolizing figures like Nathan Bedford Forrest, who became a Klan leader after the war.  The battle over civil rights has yet to be completed, especially judging by the disproportionate number of black Americans behind bars, which was the subject of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow.

I think The Wars of Reconstruction would make a great reading group selection.

Comments

  1. Rick DiguetteFebruary 7, 2014 at 4:30 PM

    Foner's "Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution: 1863-1877" is one of the most moving history books I've ever read. At times I could have wept, if I was wont to do that, for the folly regarding race that we perpetuate to this day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonFebruary 8, 2014 at 9:17 AM

    It is a great book, and really turned the page on how we look at the aftermath of the Civil War. It is sad an amazing how quickly the federal government blew a golden opportunity to change the face of the South, allowing themselves to be held hostage by the Southern states so soon thereafter.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more