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Academic studies of the Civil War and historical memory abound, ensuring a deeper understanding of how the war’s meaning has shifted over time and the implications of those changes for concepts of race, citizenship, and nationhood. The Reconstruction era, by contrast, has yet to receive similar attention from scholars. Remembering Reconstruction ably fills this void, assembling a prestigious lineup of Reconstruction historians to examine the competing social and historical memories of this pivotal and violent period in American history.


Many consider the period from 1863 (beginning with slave emancipation) to 1877 (when the last federal troops were withdrawn from South Carolina and Louisiana) an “unfinished revolution” for civil rights, racial-identity formation, and social reform. Despite the cataclysmic aftermath of the war, the memory of Reconstruction in American consciousness and its impact on the country’s fraught history of identity, race, and reparation has been largely neglected. The essays in Remembering Reconstruction advance and broaden our perceptions of the complex revisions in the nation's collective memory. Notably, the authors uncover the impetus behind the creation of black counter-memories of Reconstruction and the narrative of the “tragic era” that dominated white memory of the period. Furthermore, by questioning how Americans have remembered Reconstruction and how those memories have shaped the nation's social and political history throughout the twentieth century, this volume places memory at the heart of historical inquiry.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright
  2. pp. i-iv
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-viii
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  1. Introduction
  2. W. Fitzhugh Brundage
  3. pp. 1-14
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  1. I. WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE MEMORIES OF RECONSTRUCTION
  1. 1. Jim Crow Memory: Southern White Supremacists and the Regional Politics of Remembrance
  2. K. Stephen Prince
  3. pp. 17-34
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  1. 2. Causes Lost and Found: Remembering and Refighting Reconstruction in the Roosevelt Era
  2. Jason Morgan Ward
  3. pp. 35-56
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  1. II. BLACK COUNTER-MEMORIES OF RECONSTRUCTION
  1. 3. T. Thomas Fortune, Racial Violence of Reconstruction, and the Struggle for Historical Memory
  2. Shawn Leigh Alexander
  3. pp. 59-83
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  1. 4. Facts, Memories, and History: John R. Lynch and the Memory of Reconstruction in the Age of Jim Crow
  2. Justin Behrend
  3. pp. 84-108
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  1. 5. The Freedwoman’s Tale: Reconstruction Remembered in the Federal Writers’ Project Ex-Slave Narratives
  2. Carole Emberton
  3. pp. 109-136
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  1. III. RECONSTRUCTION AND THE CREATION OF AMERICAN EMPIRE
  1. 6. The Lessons of Reconstruction: Debating Race and Imperialism in the 1890s
  2. Mark Elliott
  3. pp. 139-172
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  1. 7. A New Reconstruction for the South
  2. Natalie J. Ring
  3. pp. 173-202
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  1. 8. “A Bitter Memory Upon Which Terms of Peace Would Rest": Woodrow Wilson, the Reconstruction of the South, and the Reconstruction of Europe
  2. Samuel L. Schaffer
  3. pp. 203-222
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  1. IV. REMEMBERING RECONSTRUCTION IN THE POST–CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
  1. 9. The Cultural Work of the Ku Klux Klan in US History Textbooks, 1883–2015
  2. Elaine Parsons
  3. pp. 225-261
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  1. 10. Wade Hampton’s Last Parade: Memory of Reconstruction in the 1970 South Carolina Tricentennial
  2. Bruce E. Baker
  3. pp. 262-280
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 281-284
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 285-296
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