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Reviewed by:
  • The Long Reconstruction: The Post–Civil War South in History, Film, and Memory by Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli, and: Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement by Aniko Bodroghkozy
  • Jacqueline Pinkowitz (bio)
THE LONG RECONSTRUCTION: The Post–Civil War South in History, Film, and Memory
by Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli
Routledge, 2014
166 pp.; paper, $34.95
EQUAL TIME: Television and the Civil Rights Movement
by Aniko Bodroghkozy
University of Illinois Press, 2013
280 pp.; paper, $27.00

The civil war, the civil rights movement, and the American South—along with their ongoing impact on race in American society—have resumed their familiar and contentious place at the heart of cultural conversation. The year 2015 marked both the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War (and the start of Reconstruction) and the 50th anniversary of the Selma voting rights campaign and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the seminal legislation of the civil rights movement. Yet the enduring legacies of the Civil War and the civil rights movement—as well as slavery and Jim Crow—have been anything but wholly triumphant. National debates about race and racial inequality have recently been sparked in response to the Supreme Court’s dismantling of key tenets of the Voting Rights Act; the “new Jim Crow” of the mass incarceration of black men; the systemic police brutality and prejudice [End Page 105] that have led to the shooting of unarmed black men and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement; and the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house following the murder of nine black men and women in an historically black church. The latter two events were both facilitated and made highly visible by television and social media. Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli’s The Long Reconstruction: The Post–Civil War South in History, Film, and Memory and Aniko Bodroghkozy’s Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement both engage with these troubled legacies and ongoing debates, addressing the racial, regional, and cultural repercussions of two of the most momentous and transformative moments in our nation’s history—the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the southern civil rights movement, respectively—in relation to their representation, historicization, and signification in popular media.

In The Long Reconstruction, Wetta and Novelli address the relatively understudied (in relation to the Civil War) era of Reconstruction, building on the work of revisionist historians to enact their own reconstruction of what historical and popular memory have tended to consider a “tragic era” for the South (8). The authors view the Reconstruction era, like history itself, as a cultural battlefield over which struggles of “history, meaning, and memory” have been—and are still—continuously fought (1). Therefore, in seeking to answer how the history of Reconstruction has been presented and remembered and how films have helped “influence the thinking about” this divisive period, Wetta and Novelli critically interrogate the ongoing impact the myths surrounding the Civil War and Reconstruction have had on race and American culture (26). Blending an analysis of history and popular culture, Reconstruction outlines the historicization of Reconstruction by professional historians, as well as its popularization in film and other cultural forms, tracing the enduring impact of romanticized Lost Cause mythology on both. For while the Confederate South lost the Civil War, it definitively won the “memory war” waged afterward over Reconstruction, coming to dominate the era’s historical narrative and popular memory through Lost Cause ideologies that cast the South as a noble victim and removed slavery (and white supremacy) from the picture (8).

Wetta and Novelli first address the historical record of Reconstruction, arguing that the central challenges and debates involved in the “contest over the future of the South” first occurred simultaneously with the Civil War, then continued for twelve years, and in many ways persisted unresolved beyond 1877 (ix). Although the war preserved the Union and abolished slavery, such vexing questions as what freedom would mean for African Americans and who would “define and control the process” of Southern Reconstruction remained to be decided—and fought over (18). These questions were...

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