A great deal has been written about southern memory centering on
the Civil War, particularly the view of the war as a valiant lost
cause. In this challenging new book Bruce Baker looks at a related,
and equally important, aspect of southern memory that has been
treated by historians only in passing: Reconstruction. What
Reconstruction Meant examines what both white and black South
Carolinians thought about the history of Reconstruction and how it
shaped the way they lived their lives in the first half of the
twentieth century.
Baker addresses the dominant white construct of "the dark days
of Reconstruction," which was instrumental both in ending
Reconstruction and in justifying Jim Crow and the disfranchisement
of African Americans in the South, setting the tone for early
historians' accounts of Reconstruction. Looking back on the same
era, African Americans and their supporters recalled a time of
potential and of rights to be regained, inspiring their continuing
struggles to change the South.
Baker draws on a tremendous range of newspapers, memoirs,
correspondence, and published materials, to show the intricate
process by which the white-supremacist memory of Reconstruction
became important in the 1890s, as segregation and
disenfranchisement took hold in the South, and how it began to
crumble as the civil rights movement gained momentum. Examining the
southern memory of Reconstruction, in all its forms, is an
essential element in understanding the society and politics of the
twentieth-century South.
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