Editors’ Note: March 2017 Issue
We are very pleased to announce the publication of our March 2017 special issue. Copies will be in your mailboxes soon, but to tide you over until then, here is the editors’ note from our guest editors, Kate Masur and Greg Downs.
One hundred and fifty years since Reconstruction, we believe now is a propitious time to take stock of the scholarly literature and public memory that shape our collective understanding of that crucial era. Almost thirty years after the publication of Eric Foner’s monumental Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, we are in the midst of a deep, searching exploration of how to define, analyze, and narrate the crucial period that began during the Civil War and extended, arguably, until the close of the century. Given the vibrancy of the field and growing attention to the public history of the era, it seems wise not to try to pin down exactly where we stand but to take stock, advance ideas, and generate conversation and debate.
To assess past and present scholarship and open paths to future work, the Journal of the Civil War Era commissioned scholars to write on discrete topics within the broader world of Reconstruction history. The forum on the future of Reconstruction, introduced and edited by Luke E. Harlow, features brief introductory notes in these pages by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Gary Gerstle, Thomas C. Holt, Martha S. Jones, Mark A. Noll, Adrienne Petty, Lisa Tetrault, Elliott West, and Kidada E. Williams. Each short piece published here serves as an introduction to a longer, freely available essay available at the journal’s Web site.
Reconstruction historiography developed within a broader literary response to the end of the Civil War and to the ongoing transformations of the nation. In his provocative historiographical essay, law and literature scholar Brook Thomas challenges historians to revisit early Reconstruction historiography and to see it in the context of twentieth-century debates about the nature of evidence, narrative, and history itself.
Beyond historical writing, the era of Reconstruction has been difficult to publicly commemorate. Page Putnam Miller and Jennifer Whitmer Taylor give us the first detailed study of an early twenty-first-century effort to create a National Park Service site devoted to the era. Beaufort, South Carolina, is at the heart of the piece, which explores the failure of a project that garnered support locally and at high levels of government. At issue here is how and where people learn about history and whom they trust to explain it.
Reconstruction remains a crucial and sometimes confusing area to teach. In her essay, Hannah Rosen discusses the approaches she and others bring to the subject in the classroom, focusing on using the period as an opportunity to teach about the history of race and racism.
Finally, in a roundtable on Reconstruction and public memory, David M. Prior moderates a discussion among four professors who have been variously involved in public history projects—Beverly Bond, Thomas J. Brown, Eric Foner, and Salamishah Tillet—along with Nancy Bercaw of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Jennifer Taylor of the Equal Justice Initiative. Their theme is the challenges and possibilities of encouraging public engagement with the era of Reconstruction.
While it is clear that certain themes will remain central to the study of the post–Civil War Era—emancipation and abolition, racial formation, labor, state building, constitutional change, and enfranchisement—the essays published here remind us of the protean nature of a period that, a century and a half later, remains open to new historical questions and dramatic reinterpretation. Our hope is that this special issue inspires further discussion and debate about where this era’s future might lie.