This book, originally published in 1919, is a telling of U.S. history from colonial times to Reconstruction. Written by a British soldier mostly from the battlefields of World War One, it provides a British perspective of U.S. history that was reflective of the author's time. Modern scholars take issue with this telling and have proven many inaccuracies in its pages, but the text still stands as a reflection of the sometimes rich and inspiring and sometimes base and unfortunate attitudes and perspectives of America's birth and rise.
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United States Reconstruction Across the Americas
Historians have examined the American Civil War and its aftermath for more than a century, yet little work has situated this important era in a global context. Contributors to this volume broaden the scope of Reconstruction by viewing it not as an insular process but as an international phenomenon. Here, three leading international scholars explore how emancipation, nationhood and nationalism, and the spread of market capitalism—issues central to the period in the United States—were interwoven with global patterns of political, social, and economic change. Rafael Marquese explores the integrated trajectories of slavery in the United States and Brazil, tracing the connections, interactions, and transformations of the coffee and cotton economies in both countries. Don Doyle discusses how Secretary of State William Seward eliminated a possible Confederate revival and hostile European presence supported by Mexico's Maximilian regime. Edward Rugemer reconsiders how Jamaica's Morant Bay Rebellion influenced Reconstruction by demonstrating that emancipation without citizenship, political rights, or economic opportunities can have violent consequences. This volume suggests new discussions about how the Civil War reshaped the United States' relationship to the world and how large-scale international developments influenced the country's transition from slavery to freedom. A volume in the series Frontiers of the American South, edited by William A. Link Contributors: William A. Link | Don H. Doyle | Rafael Marquese | Edward Rugemer
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Writing Reconstruction : Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South
After the Civil War, the South was divided into five military districts occupied by Union forces. Out of these regions, a remarkable group of writers emerged. Experiencing the long-lasting ramifications of Reconstruction firsthand, many of these writers sought to translate the era's promise into practice. In fiction, newspaper journalism, and other forms of literature, authors including George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgee, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Octave Thanet imagined a new South in which freedpeople could prosper as citizens with agency. Radically re-envisioning the role of women in the home, workforce, and marketplace, these writers also made gender a vital concern of their work. Still, working from the South, the authors were often subject to the whims of a northern literary market. Their visions of citizenship depended on their readership's deference to conventional claims of duty, labor, reputation, and property ownership. The circumstances surrounding the production and circulation of their writing blunted the full impact of the period's literary imagination and fostered a drift into the stereotypical depictions and other strictures that marked the rise of Jim Crow. Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle blends literary history with archival research to assess the significance of Reconstruction literature as a genre. Founded on witness and dream, the pathbreaking work of its writers made an enduring, if at times contradictory, contribution to American literature and history.
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Although Abraham Lincoln dominates the literature on the American Civil War, he remains less commonly associated with reconstruction. Previous scholarly works touch on Lincoln and reconstruction, but they tend either to speculate on what Lincoln might have done after the war had he not been assassinated or to approach his reconstruction plans merely as a means of winning the war. In this thought-provoking study, John C. Rodrigue offers a succinct but significant survey of Lincoln's wartime reconstruction initiatives while providing a fresh interpretation of the president's plans for postwar America. Revealing that Lincoln concerned himself with reconstruction from the earliest days of his presidency, Rodrigue details how Lincoln's initiatives unfolded, especially in the southern states where they were attempted. He explores Lincoln's approach to various issues relevant to reconstruction, including slavery, race, citizenship, and democracy; his dealings with Congressional Republicans, especially the Radicals; his support for and eventual abandonment of colonization; his dealings with the border states; his handling of the calls for negotiations with the Confederacy as a way of reconstructing the Union; and his move toward emancipation and its implications for his approach to reconstruction. As the Civil War progressed, Rodrigue shows, Lincoln's definition of reconstruction transformed from the mere restoration of the seceded states to a more fundamental social, economic, and political reordering of southern society and of the Union itself. Based on Lincoln's own words and writings as well as an extensive array of secondary literature, Rodrigue traces the evolution of Lincoln's thinking on reconstruction, providing new insight into a downplayed aspect of his presidency.
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