Books in the Reconstructing America series

Through informative case studies, this illuminating book remaps considerations of the Civil War and Reconstruction era by charting the ways in which the needs, interests, and experiences of going to war, fighting it, and making sense of it informed and directed politics, public life, social change, and cultural memory after the war's end.

This volume examines the historical connections between the United States¿ Reconstruction and the country¿s emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism.In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation¿s betrayal of the South¿s fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons.Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding Americäs Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln¿s promise of a ¿new birth of freedom¿ in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones¿to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for Americäs Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln¿s promise of a ¿new birth of freedom¿ in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones¿to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for Americäs Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

This book explores the tumultuous history of state making in mid-nineteenth- century North America from a continental perspective. Essays by experts on Canadian Confederation, the U.S. Civil War, Mexico's fight against French imperialists, and indigenous Americans shed new light on events traditionally studied as separate national stories.

New Men uncovers the narrative of veteran reentry into civilian life and exposes a growing gap between how former soldiers of the Civil War saw themselves and the representations of them created by late nineteenth-century American society. This gap generated a new conception of the "veteran" still influential today.

In the Election of 1872 the conflict between President US Grant and Horace Greeley has been typically understood as a battle for the soul of the ruling Republican Party. This book argues that the campaign was more than a narrow struggle between Party elites and a class-based radical reform movement.

"Engs deserves credit for the sophistication and scope of his study and for his attention to the subtle and paradoxical. The questions addressed, the logical scope of the book, the depth of research, and the author's crisp writing style contribute to making this book a major addition to the literature."-Journal of American History

Emma Spaulding''s life might have been the simple story of a nineteenth-century woman in rural Maine. Instead, wooed by the ambitious John Emory Bryant, the Yankee Reconstruction activist and Georgia politician, she became the Civil War bride of a Republican carpetbagger intent on reforming the South. The grueling years in the shadow of her husband''s controversial political career gave her a backbone of steel and the convictions of an early feminist. Emma supported John''s agenda-to "northernize" the South and work for civil rights for African-Americans- and frequently reflected on national political events. Struggling virtually alone to rear a daughter in near poverty, Emma became an independent thinker, suffragist, and officer in the Woman''s Christian Temperance Union. In eloquent letters, Emma coached her husband''s understanding of "the woman question;" their remarkable correspondence frames a marriage of love and summarizes John''s career as it determined the contours of Emma''s own storyΓÇöfrom the bitter politics of Reconstruction Georgia to her world as a mother, writer, editor, and teacher in Tennessee and, with her husband, running a mission for the homeless in New York.In this extraordinary resource, Ruth Douglas Currie organizes and edits their voluminous correspondence, enhancing the letters with an extensive introduction to Emma Spaulding Bryant''s life, times, and legacy.

This a collection of letters by Emma Spaulding who left behind rural Maine for a life in Georgia as the wife of radical Republican carpetbagger John Emory Bryant. Emma supported John's controversial agenda and became an independent thinker, teacher, suffragist, and officer in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

Through informative case studies, this illuminating book remaps considerations of the Civil War and Reconstruction era by charting the ways in which the needs, interests, and experiences of going to war, fighting it, and making sense of it informed and directed politics, public life, social change, and cultural memory after the war's end.

This book explores the tumultuous history of state making in mid-nineteenth- century North America from a continental perspective. Essays by experts on Canadian Confederation, the U.S. Civil War, Mexico's fight against French imperialists, and indigenous Americans shed new light on events traditionally studied as separate national stories.

In this innovative book, Edmund L. Drago tells the first full story of white children and their families in the most militant Southern state, and the state where the Civil War erupted.

Finally available in one volume, these ten classic essays by a leading scholar track the way key political, factional, and legal struggles, shaped by popular commitment to constitutional principles, affected the framing, interpretation, and enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. With a major introduction and updates throughout.

This book is an account of two significant laws passed during the US Civil War, The Confiscation Acts (1861-62). It examines their political contexts, especially the debates in Congress, and demonstrates how the failure of the confiscation acts during the war presaged the political and structural shortcomings of Reconstruction after the war.

"Should be required reading ... for all historians, jurists, lawyers, political scientists, and government officials who in one way or another are responsible for understanding and interpreting our civil rights past."-Harold M. Hyman, Journal of Southern History

"A Free Ballot and a Fair Count" examines the efforts by the Department of Justice to implement the federal legislation passed by Congress in 1870-71 known as the Enforcement Acts.

A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedmen's Rights, 1861-1866, is an account of how laws, policies and constitutional amendments defining and protecting the personal liberty and civil rights of the country's African American population were adopted during the Civil War.

The author of this work explores the immediate aftermath of slavery in Maryland, which differed ways from other slaveholding states of the South: it never left the Union; white radicals had access to power; and, even before legal emancipation, a large free black population lived there.

This text looks at the life of John Emory Bryant, a veteran of the Civil War who became a Carpetbagger in Georgia during the reconstruction era. It looks at his life in the army, and his work with the Freedman's Bureau, an organization designed to protect and assist newly freed slaves.

This book examines how de facto segregation unfolded and operated at the New Jersey shore after the Civil War. Weaving together histories of race, leisure, and consumption, it argues that the politics of mass consumption contained early desegregation efforts and prolonged Jim Crow.

This work focuses on Bureau agents at a more personal level. The answers illuminate who officials believed qualified-or not-to oversee the freedpeople's transition to freedom. Officials in Texas desired those able to meet emancipation's challenges. That meant northern-born, mature, white men from the middle and upper-middle class, and generally with military experience.

Book explores the post-Civil War creation of African American public schools in Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama. Urban African Americans and their partners redefined American citizenship, created essential educational resources, and ensured that children had access to a quality education taught by African American teachers at the turn-of-the-twentieth century.

This text brings together many scholars who have been working through the Freedman's Bureau papers and other sources, to rethink the Bureau's place in securing freedom and remaking the South. It presents a sampling of the range and variety of work being done on the Bureau.

Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands - more commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau - in March 1865. Upon its creation this temporary federal agency assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the war-torn South.