The Future of Reconstruction Studies

Reconstruction and Labor
http://journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-reconstruction-studies

In recent years, a new generation of historians has set out to transform our understanding of U.S. history by arguing that slavery was central to the development of American capitalism. Slavery in the American South, they insist, was a capitalist labor system. But what does this new trend in the historiography mean for how we understand Reconstruction? Should historians of Reconstruction revise the prevailing interpretation that the end of slavery brought a transition to a capitalist mode of production in the southern countryside? So far, the latest interpretations of slavery as a capitalist labor system have had little impact on how social and labor historians view Reconstruction. Instead, the most recent works expand on a long line of influential scholarship, from the 1970s through the 1990s, arguing that the postwar labor system underwent a capitalist transformation. Looking forward, historians of labor and Reconstruction have the potential to expand our understanding of the revolutionary nature of the postemancipation period by focusing renewed attention on class relations, grassroots and household struggles over land and labor, and an ever-widening cast of characters with a stake in Reconstruction.