Reconstruction

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  1/17/2023
  

  Kidada Williams on The Reconstruction that Wasn't

  In the new "I Saw Death Coming," Williams describes a "shadow Confederacy" that refused to cede freedom or dignity to African Americans who often lived far from the reach of a federal government that was unreliably committed to their protection. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  12/19/2022
  

  Albion Tourgée's Forgotten Proposal for Power to the People

  by Brook Thomas

  The Black Republican activist hoped to draft a Reconstruction constitution for North Carolina that vested power in the people, which might have prevented the potential mischief that could be unleashed by Supreme Court cases that threaten to empower state legislatures to thwart democracy. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  11/6/2022
  

  Why the States of the Confederacy are the Foundation of American Gun Culture

  by Nick Buttrick

  White Southerners' efforts to reclaim power after Reconstruction help explain how Americans think about guns: what they're used for, and whom they're used against. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  11/2/2022
  

  Can a History of America's First Two Reconstructions Make a Third one Possible?

  Peniel Joseph's book looks to the past struggles to define and achieve freedom and equality to ask what America's Third Reconstruction – begun with Obama's election and attacked since– must do to survive and advance. 

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• SOURCE: MSNBC
  10/26/2022
  

  Kidada Williams Joins Chris Hayes to Talk Reconstruction and Political Violence

  "Ex-Confederates didn't let go of slavery lightly. They did what they could to hold on to it. And so, African-Americans largely had to fight their way out of bondage."

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• SOURCE: Balls and Strikes
  10/28/2022
  

  Eric Foner: Originalism and the Color-Blind Constitution are Intellectually Indefensible

  The historian says that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was on the right track to argue that the meaning of the 14th Amendment must be understood in context of its authors' intention to end the race-based subjugation of Black people. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  10/27/2022
  

  The Freedman's Bank Forum Obscures the Institution's Real History

  by Justene Hill Edwards

  Vice President Kamala Harris's recent remarks at the forum enlisted the Freedman's Bank to celebrate public-private partnerships between banks and minority communities. The real history of the Freedman's Bank shows why public-private partnerships and moral uplift are inadequate to promote financial equity. 

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• SOURCE: The Forum
  10/17/2022
  

  The Democrats Haven't Learned the Lessons of the Nation's First Voting Rights Act

  by Ed Burmila

  Beginning with the failure of the Lodge Act in 1890, parties have treated voting rights as just one of many policy priorities competing for space on the agenda and scarce political capital, instead of a basic precondition of functioning democracy. Democrats today are repeating this mistake. 

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• SOURCE: CNN
  10/12/2022
  

  Will the 2022 Midterms Echo 1866?

  by Manisha Sinha

  A rogue president inciting violence, economic uncertainty, and political factionism threatening to erupt into violence: In 1866, the severity of southern reaction pushed other voters out of complacency to keep reconstruction on track. Will outrage over January 6 and abortion restrictions similarly safeguard the halting turn away from Trump? 

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• SOURCE: The Nation
  10/3/2022
  

  Thulani Davis Reconsiders the Geography of Freedom During Reconstruction

  Emancipation wasn't just an idea, it was a literal place, described in a new book as the route around the periphery of the South traced by Black Americans in pursuit of work, business, and family reunification. 

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• SOURCE: TIME
  9/15/2022
  

  The Promise and Peril of the "Third Reconstruction"

  by Peniel E. Joseph

  At a time when the nation is balanced precariously between advocates for multiracial democracy and white nationalists, it is important to understand the history and the incompleteness of the expansion of freedom and democracy during Reconstruction. 

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• SOURCE: WNYC
  8/22/2022
  

  Newspaper Ads Freedmen Filed for Family Reunification Aid African American Genealogy Today

  Historian Blair Kelley and NYT writer Rachel Swarns discuss the archival ads placed by the newly emancipated to locate family members, and how those fill in the gaps for descendants seeking to assemble family histories. 

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• SOURCE: Vox
  8/2/2022
  

  A Substantive Due Process Explainer: What Was the Basic Weakness of Roe?

  The application of the 14th Amendment to extend broad guarantees of individual rights is recent; the history of the doctrine of substantive due process has more frequently been used to protect the interests of corporations and the powerful. It's time for a new legal approach.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  7/2/2022
  

  Anti-Trespassing Laws a Vestige of Racist "Black Codes" of Postbellum South

  by Brian Sawers

  Trespassing laws were ostensibly "color blind," but worked in practice to restrict the mobility of Freedmen and women in the South and to empower white landowners to control Black social life. 

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• 7/8/2022
  

  The Second Floundering

  by Brook Thomas

  Although scholars have identified the Reconstruction Amendments as a redemption of the flaws of the original Constitution, it's important to understand, as critics did at the time, that the 14th and 15th Amendments left many gaps in the American democracy. 

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• SOURCE: TIME
  5/23/2022
  

  How Violence Crushed the Achievements of Reconstruction

  by Clyde W. Ford

  Both the formerly enslaved and their poor white partners in governing pursued significant changes in the political economy of the south, but those they won were stripped away by violence. 

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• SOURCE: WMAR
  4/28/2022
  

  NMAAHC and Local Historians Team Up to Preserve Tale of Maryland Freedmen's School

  "A month before the Civil War formally ended, a 20-year-old Black woman and prolific writer named Edmonia Highgate came from upstate New York to Harford County to launch a school for former slaves."

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• SOURCE: The Nation
  4/30/2022
  

  W.E.B. DuBois's Abolition Democracy

  by Gerald Horne

  DuBois understood the impossibility of separating a historical analysis of Reconstruction from the political context of Jim Crow racial totalitarianism and exploitative capitalism. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/31/2022
  

  Lies We Teach to Kids about the Reconstruction Era

  by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

  "The narrative of Reconstruction perpetuated by many state social studies standards is part of a longer and larger struggle over the past, the latest episode of which can be seen in a rash of new restrictions on what teachers can tell young people about our nation’s history.

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• SOURCE: Wash
  3/13/2022
  

  Painful, Cutting, and Brilliant: The Meaning of Freedom in Letters to Former Enslavers

  by Gillian Brockell

  Wages and economic security, citizenship rights and family unification were core concerns addressed in letters from free Black people to their former enslavers.