Panelists were Elizabeth Barnes (University of Reading), “‘I Saw Their Stars’: Race, Rape, and Policing in the Reconstruction South;” Bradley D. Proctor (Evergreen State College), “Southern Policing and the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction;” and Samuel Watts (University of Melbourne), “Reconstruction Justice: Black Law Enforcement and the Politics of Space in Charleston and New Orleans.”
Read MorePanelists were Courtney Buchkoski (University of Oklahoma), “Lessons from Kansas: The New England Emigrant Aid Company and Imperial Projects in the Reconstruction Era;” Evan Rothera (Sam Houston State University), “The Complete Triumph of National Arms in the Cause of the Republican Constitutional Government: Anti-Imperialism and U.S./Mexico Relations;” and Cecily Zander (Pennsylvania State University), “The Great Task Remaining: The Reconstruction-Era Army in Texas.”
Read MoreAn interview wit John Reeves, author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee.
Read MoreThe 14th Amendment was a part of Reconstruction history, but its effects and interpretations are still being debated. It was meant to engage the four million formerly enslaved people with its prevailing morality – the language of equal justice after the Civil War. This was quite meaningful to the people of New Orleans who brought some of the first suits in the nation to uphold the rights of African descendants.
Read MoreWithin one hundred miles of Ft. Monroe, the catalyst for military emancipation under the command of Benjamin Butler, military operations along the coast of Virginia bled into North Carolina’s Outer Banks and had lasting implications for its seemingly small population. Within this militarily and geographically dynamic area, Richard Etheridge would make a name for himself both as an advocate for Civil Rights and leader of the freedman’s population along the coast.
Read MoreAs we enter into the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction many historians are questioning how to re-interpret the period and present it to the public. From a lay perspective history is often seen as stagnant, made up of names, dates, and facts to be learned and recited. But in reality, the understanding of history shifts and changes as new evidence is uncovered or a new interpretation is adopted. In historian lingo this is called historiography, essentially the history of how history has been understood and presented in the past. In terms of Reconstruction, there has been a wide swing of scholarship in the last century.
Read MoreWhat are the boundaries of Reconstruction and how can historians redefine them? This was the subject of a roundtable session at the Southern featuring Stephen Hahn, Stacy L. Smith, Elliott West, and Heather C. Richardson as panelists. Historians usually define the period of Reconstruction as 1865-1877 where Americans rebuilt the country and racial relations after the Civil War and most equate the end of Reconstruction with the destruction of black civil rights in the south. These historians challenged the audience to rethink the meanings of Reconstruction.
Read MoreIn our first-ever Roundtable this summer, we asked Civil Discourse's scholars what event most influenced the outcome of the Civil War. Our answers were wide-ranging, but they would have been familiar to many of our readers: the Emancipation Proclamation, the Battle of Antietam, the fall of Atlanta, and more. Today, we shift our attention to areas overlooked or left behind by scholars, asking our panel:
What Civil War topics deserve greater attention from historians and scholars?
Read MoreHow does the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution relate to a group of disgruntled butchers? In 1873, the United States Supreme Court struggled to answer exactly this question.
Perhaps no image better captured the tumultuous and confused nature of the Reconstruction Era than former Supreme Court Justice John Campbell during the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases. A former slave owner who served as the Assistant Secretary of War for the Confederacy, Campbell oddly found himself arguing against states rights in an attempt to overturn a Louisiana state statute. When the Reconstructionist, Republican-dominated legislature of Louisiana incorporated all the slaughterhouses within New Orleans, giving a single company the exclusive right to slaughter within the city, no one expected the butcher’s protests to lead to the first interpretation of the new Fourteenth Amendment by the nation’s highest court. Campbell, however, quickly saw an opportunity.
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