Reviewed by: Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era ed. by Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker April E. Holm Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era. Edited by Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker. Introduction by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. viii, 286. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6602-4.) We are now well into the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, although it is passing with much less fanfare than did the anniversaries of the Civil War. There is not much public representation of Reconstruction and little contemporary consensus on lessons to be drawn from the period. This has not always been the case. From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, white Americans shared a strong, coherent historical memory of Reconstruction. It held that former slaves had been granted suffrage too quickly, that northern zealots had lined their own pockets while trampling on the rights of white southerners, and that white southerners were themselves helpless victims of corrupt state governments during the darkest era of American history. This narrative did not go uncontested, however. Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era, a collection of essays edited by Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker, offers a timely series of meditations on the varied and surprising ways memories of Reconstruction have been employed in the 140 years since it ended. This reassessment is particularly fitting because, as W. Fitzhugh Brundage points out in his incisive introduction, professional historians were deeply involved in producing a racist narrative of Reconstruction that justified the disenfranchisement and segregation of African American southerners. This collection of ten essays is divided into four sections: one on white supremacist memories of Reconstruction, one on black memories of Reconstruction, one on Reconstruction and American imperialism, and one on memories of Reconstruction after the civil rights era. The essays span more than one hundred years of American history, from the Jim Crow era to the present. Taken as a whole, they remind us that Americans have remembered—and forgotten—Reconstruction in complex and challenging ways. They make a case for the lasting importance of those memories even as popular consensus around the meaning of the period has eroded. While there is some unevenness in this collection in terms of polish and depth of historiographical intervention, the essays cohere around several key themes. As K. Stephen Prince and Jason Morgan Ward emphasize, the political and social memories of Reconstruction were vital to implementing and upholding white supremacy. However, as Shawn Leigh Alexander and Justin Behrend argue, African Americans consistently promoted counternarratives that resisted dominant white [End Page 1017] interpretations of the era. Several essays in the collection, such as those by Mark Elliott and Natalie J. Ring, demonstrate how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans applied the lessons they drew from Reconstruction to varied enterprises, such as imperial projects and domestic reform. Some essays in particular expand our understanding of how the memory of Reconstruction has been used. In "The Freedwoman's Tale: Reconstruction Remembered in the Federal Writers' Project Ex-Slave Narratives," Carole Emberton challenges assumptions about the moment of emancipation and what followed. She begins with a 1930s narrative in which a former slave proudly describes how her erstwhile master, a Ku Klux Klan member, helped suppress an uprising among freedpeople at a neighboring plantation. Although this incident was seemingly at odds with what we would expect of former slaves at the moment of emancipation, Emberton persuasively argues that this narrative (and other sources like it) should not be dismissed. They provide much-needed insight into the lived experience of emancipation. Rather than constituting an uncomplicated "Jubilee moment," emancipation ushered in a period of violence that taught enslaved people the importance of maintaining strong relationships with local whites and the dangers of aligning too closely with any political party (p. 111). In connecting southern agrarian violence of the 1930s to ex-slave narratives about the Reconstruction era, Emberton concludes that the lessons learned after emancipation applied well into the twentieth century. In "'A Bitter Memory Upon Which Terms of Peace Would Rest': Woodrow Wilson, the Reconstruction...