History News Network

Reconstruction

Originally published 09/25/2013
Meet William Mahone, the Ex-Confederate General Who Built His Political Career on the Black Vote

Mahone and his Readjuster Party formed a biracial coalition that controlled Virginia for four years in the 1880s.

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.

Originally published 07/22/2013
The Roots of White Rage

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, white Southerners lashed out with homicidal rage against their former bondsmen.

Originally published 07/15/2013
Trayvon Martin the Latest Victim of America's Fear of Black Men

Today, as under Reconstruction, the idea that fear justifies violence is as dangerous one.

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....

Originally published 01/11/2013
The Real Origin of America's Gun Culture

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.

Originally published 10/12/2011
Welcome Home, General Grant

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.