Brooks D. Simpson, ed., Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Library of America, 2018). From the "Introduction":
Most Americans don't know very much about Reconstruction, and in many cases what they may think they know is wrong. This shortcoming is understandable. Sometimes passed over in traditional high school or college history courses, the period can also be marginalized as an unseemly interval between the heroic drama of the Civil War and the advent of the tremendous economic, social, and political changes set into motion by the late nineteenth-century triad of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Popular imagination of the era in the early twentieth century was captured in two famous films based on best-selling novels, Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939), both of which offered vivid portrayals of the persistence and eventual triumph of southern whites over the forces of evil represented by a malevolent alliance of greedy carpetbaggers, treacherous scalawags, and ignorant freedman. Although some scholars challenged this perspective--most notable, W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction (1935)--only in the 1950s did a wave of revisionist reassessment, inspired in part by the civil rights movement, begin to present different perspectives as historians debated the meaning of Reconstruction and why it turned out as it did. These debates have yet to become part of our popular memory. [] For many Americans, Reconstruction is not an essential part of our national story, or fundamental to our sense of who we are today. The exception to this marginalization is to be found in the consciousness of black America, where the invocation 'forty acres and a mule' powerfully evokes memories of an era of promise and betrayal.Id. at xxiii.).
