Unfinished Revolution Research Articles

Book Review: Ibrahim Fraihat (2016). Unfinished Revolutions: Yemen, Libya, and Tunisia after the Arab Spring

Book Review: Ibrahim Fraihat (2016). <i>Unfinished Revolutions: Yemen, Libya, and Tunisia after the Arab Spring</i>

Revolutionary Ideology and the Special Period in Cuban History

Revolutionary Ideology and the Special Period in Cuban History Mauricio Castro (bio) Devyn Spence Benson. Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xviii + 311 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Elizabeth Campisi. Escape to Miami: An Oral History of the Cuban Rafter Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xii + 214 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. The collapse of the Soviet Union robbed Cuba of its primary trading partner and international benefactor and brought about a time known as the "special period," when economic hardship and uncertainty threatened the stability of the revolution in the 1990s. In 1990, with Soviet power and influence waning, the Cuban government triggered a series of austerity and rationing schemes originally intended for wartime. These conditions were compounded by the U.S. Congress's tightening of the embargo against Cuba through the passage of the Cuban Democracy Act in 1992 and the Helms Burton Act in 1996. The U.S. government sought to capitalize on a moment of weakness to destabilize the Cuban government and to possibly unseat Fidel Castro. Cuban policymakers reacted by adopting certain market-based measures to try to salvage the nation's economy. For ordinary Cubans, the lived experience of these policies was one of shortages in food, labor, and services. Economic instability was central to the experience of the special period. This instability also led Cubans to question their beliefs and circumstances. Louis Pérez, Jr., prominent scholar of Cuban history, notes that not since the early 1960s "were existing value systems subject to as much pressure as they were during the 1990s."1 Two new books on Cuba and the Cuban diaspora document how the economic hardships of the special period put significant pressure on revolutionary principles. Devyn Spence Benson's Antiracism in Cuba and Elizabeth Campisi's Escape to Miami are two very different projects that are centered on the ideological challenges of the special period. Benson's work seeks to understand the apparent revival of racist attitudes against Cubans of African descent, a group acutely affected by the nation's economic woes during the special period [End Page 156] and in its aftermath. She builds on existing scholarship by challenging notions of a "return of racism" to Cuba, arguing instead that the revolution's vaunted antiracist legacy of the late 1950s and early 1960s was incomplete. Campisi's oral history of the rafter crisis of the mid-1990s builds on existing social science literature on the nature of disaffection with the Cuban revolution. Campisi documents the life experiences of several rafters now living in the United States and offers fascinating insights into the events and thought processes that drove Cubans to turn their back on the revolution and risk a perilous sea crossing to escape the deprivations of the special period. Taken in concert, these works show both the shortcomings and resiliency of Cuban revolutionary culture in the face of the pressures Pérez describes. The crisis of the special period demonstrated how Cuba's antiracism campaign was woefully incomplete and accelerated the process of disaffection for many Cubans, but it demonstrated the continuity of revolutionary cultural structures both on the island and as a part of the balsero phase of the diaspora. In Antiracism in Cuba, Devyn Spence Benson examines the persistence of racism in Cuba, most clearly seen during the special period and after, by focusing on the accomplishments, inherent contradictions, and unfinished nature of the revolutionary government's 1959 campaign against discrimination. She finds that this program enacted real social change while also fueling the creation of the revolutionary government's myth of being able to root out racism in a three-year period. Benson places the history of the antiracist campaign in the context of earlier revolutionary discourses, particularly José Martí's rhetoric of "racelessness" in the 1895 war for independence. Benson finds that this ideological challenge to racial privilege, while useful in unifying Cubans against the Spanish and later repurposed by both republican and revolutionary leaders, remained incomplete as they "failed to transform the island's negative relationship to blackness or positive link to whiteness and ultimately silenced...

Unfinished Revolution: the political philosophy of the Frankfurt School

The article is devoted to analysis of political philosophy of T.-W. Adorno and other representatives of the Frankfurt School. They exposed the power as ideology, which takes various forms, uses resources philosophy, mythology and art. Adorno’s negative dialectics has developed a project on the basis of which it is possible to the emancipation of people covered by the powerful propaganda machines of today. Thematic horizon in the context that was developing his negative dialectic, are elements of Jewish messianism and Protestantism Luthers, dialectic Hegels, alienation theory Marx’s, immoralizm Nietzsche. For critics of the ideology of modernism the representatives of the Frankfurt School have used resources of the philosophical dialectic. They proposed a new form of protest, which saw the promotions representatives of the cultural avantgarde. In their view, class struggle, and the change of life forms is the main strategy of the cultural revolution. The merit of T. Adorno, M. Horkhaimer and G. Marcuse is a critical analysis of the new forms of governance media culture. “Political esthetics” complements the negative dialectic. In addition to criticism of the values of bourgeois society for the liberation of the people, it is proposed to use the possibilities of avantgarde art, especially new music, according to Adorno, turns consumers into accomplices. If light music distracts and entertains, new music is fosters critical reflection sensuality and, thus, exempt from installation on pleasure. Comparing projects of Frankfurt School with modern social and cultural processes, it must be said that they have not been translated. Connection of art, philosophy, and life was not as desired. At the Foundation of modern mass society remains not critical reflection, and consumption and entertainment.

Expanding the Boundaries of Reconstruction

Expanding the Boundaries of Reconstruction Justin Behrend (bio) Steven E. Nash. Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xiv + 288 pp. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. Carolyn L. Karcher. A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xviii + 464 pp. Halftones, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. The historiographical boundaries of Reconstruction were once clear and well accepted. For much of the twentieth century, the field, to use Bernard Weisberger's term, was a "dark and bloody ground" of starkly different interpretations.1 William Dunning and his acolytes set the tone by declaring Reconstruction an utter failure in no small part due to the efforts of radical Republicans to treat black people similar to white people. Revisionist scholars countered by arguing that Reconstruction was, in fact, a noble effort that moved former Confederate states toward democracy. Postrevisionists, however, questioned the significance of black male voting and Republican political power since former slaveholders retained their land and former slaves continued to labor in the fields. Then, in 1988, Eric Foner published his masterful synthesis, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, which sustained the revisionist interpretation and subsequently dominated the field. But since Foner, the clear lines of Reconstruction historiography have blurred. Although historians have added much to our understanding of the era, there has not been a significant challenge to Foner's interpretation. Part of the reason for the sustaining nature of Foner's work is that the freedom narrative still has a powerful grip on conceptualizations of American history. Another reason is that Foner helped to solidify the chronological scope of Reconstruction and its primary focus on politics and governance. While other syntheses of Reconstruction have been published in recent years, neither departs substantively from Foner's interpretation and each accepts a similar scope and focus.2 [End Page 79] Despite this continuity of framing, historians are increasingly pressing the boundaries of Reconstruction, challenging the chronology, exploring different places, and calling into question the very meaning of the term "Reconstruction." The two books under review here are part of this shift away from the traditional framework of Reconstruction historiography. Steven E. Nash directs our attention to the mountain South, while Carolyn L. Karcher focuses on Albion Tourgée's long postwar struggle against white supremacy. Neither are large departures from the existing scholarship, but both show how the most innovative work in the postbellum era seeks to expand our conceptualization of Reconstruction. In Reconstruction's Ragged Edge, Steven E. Nash largely adopts the traditional periodization of Reconstruction, but he shifts focus from the Deep South to Appalachia. In so doing, he reorients our perspective away from the story of how plantation districts shed slavery and instead focuses on the legacies of war's injustices, the new politics of biracialism, and the challenge of adapting to greater market integration. The twenty-one mountain counties in western North Carolina that form the basis for this illuminating and deeply researched account sat on the edge of the southern economy and at the margins of national politics. But the Civil War and Reconstruction, Nash contends, shattered "the localized world" of mountaineers, ushering in a series of new power brokers and subjecting local people to regional, national, and international transformations (p. 4). Although the number of enslaved and free black people in western North Carolina was small, the region was closely tied to slavery. Mountain farmers produced a surplus of food and sold their excess to markets in the lower south. Mountaineers also held similarly racist views toward black people as other white southerners did elsewhere. The war, however, ruptured the local rhythms of these counties. It pulled military age men out of the region and in to Confederate service, but it also brought to the region Confederate officials who increasingly disrupted local people's lives through conscription, tax-in-kind policies, and the home guard. The outbreak of guerrilla war, with some white mountaineers fighting for the Union and others deserting from Confederate service to join the Federals, further unraveled the antebellum social...

Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South by Michael W. Fitzgerald

Reviewed by: Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South by Michael W. Fitzgerald Amanda Brickell Bellows (bio) Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South. By Michael W. Fitzgerald. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 451 Cloth, $49.95.) Michael W. Fitzgerald's Reconstruction in Alabama offers a new interpretation of the period of Reconstruction (1865–77) in Alabama. No historian has produced a comparable narrative since the publication of Walter Lynwood Fleming's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama in 1905. Fitzgerald seeks to present a more "reliable, modern account" than that of Fleming by exploring the ways in which different groups of Alabamians worked together across racial lines to achieve particular political and economic objectives during the period of Reconstruction (2). He also identifies historical moments such as the Panic of 1873 and its subsequent depression that resulted in the collapse of interracial cooperation, growing white violence against freedpeople, and the end of Reconstruction with the rise of the Democratic Party. A professor of history at St. Olaf College, Fitzgerald joins a host of American scholars who have produced revisionist histories of Reconstruction in recent years that challenge the Dunning school's critique of Radical Republicans. With its emphasis on politics, economic policies, and collective action, Fitzgerald's methodological approach is akin to that of Eric Foner and Steven Hahn, whose works he admires. But Reconstruction in Alabama differs from Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988) and Hahn's A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003) because of the author's specific focus on the connections between economic instability, political violence, and class divisions. Fitzgerald recognizes the "centrality of racial reaction in Reconstruction politics" but primarily seeks to show in his book how "sharp divisions among whites [End Page 349] over development policy, and subsequently over how to avoid state bankruptcy, opened avenues of political influence to African Americans" (3). As pragmatic politicians, he argues, black Republicans exploited divisions among whites to form a political coalition that crossed racial boundaries. Black Republicans joined hill-country Unionists and carpetbaggers, for instance, in an effort to achieve their aims. Thus Fitzgerald's history offers insight into the unifying forces and schisms that alternately brought together or separated different social groups during Reconstruction in a state-based case study that he anticipates will provide "a vantage point for broader reflection on the state of Reconstruction scholarship, and on its meaning for contemporary America" (1). Reconstruction in Alabama is divided into three parts comprising twelve chapters organized chronologically. Each of the chapters assesses a particular topic that sheds light on the evolving political and economic conditions at different points during Reconstruction. Freedpeople receive less attention in the first part than in the second and third parts, a strategy Fitzgerald employs in order to assess divisions among white Alabamians early on. Drawing from materials in archives located primarily in the South, North, and Midwest, Fitzgerald examines diaries, correspondence, Confederate applications for presidential pardons, judicial records, newspapers, and more. His concentrated approach and broad source base enable him to present a long-overdue analysis of the individuals and forces that defined and shaped the period of Reconstruction in Alabama. In chapter 1, Fitzgerald outlines the different political constituencies in prewar and wartime Alabama, while in chapter 2 he studies the consequences of Union occupation and the effect on local populations. Chapters 3 and 4 cover Presidential Reconstruction, the activities of Unionists, and the governorship of Robert Miller Patton between 1865 and 1868. Fitzgerald transitions from the political maneuverings of white Alabamians to the mobilization of freedpeople in chapter 5, which marks the beginning of part 2. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 deal with the connections between Republican governor William Hugh Smith's championing of railroad construction and the ways in which violence against freedpeople pervaded Alabama during his term. In chapter 9, Fitzgerald discusses improvements in labor conditions for blacks and whites during Democratic governor Robert Burns Lindsay's term (1870–72), and in chapter 10 he analyzes the recovery of the plantation economy, the election of...

Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown

Reviewed by: Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown Kevin Butterfield (bio) Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War. By Richard D. Brown. ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 387. Cloth, $40.00.) When John Jay combined his efforts with those of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to support ratification of the proposed Constitution coming out of the Philadelphia Convention, he devoted his first turn as Publius to an argument as patently untrue in 1787 as it is today: Americans were, wrote Jay in The Federalist, Number 2, "one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government," and so on. Surely a strong national union could be built from a citizenry so similar, Jay suggested. Though there were various "orders and denominations of men among us," which he offhandedly conceded there were, nonetheless "we have uniformly been one people[,] each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection." Even if it was something more asserted than lived, there has been what historian Richard Brown calls a "presumption of equal rights" since the earliest days of this nation's history (27). And what Brown sets out to understand in this wide-ranging, insightful, and utterly readable book are the ways that that presumption of equal rights, in itself, has generated contests, challenges, and consequential change in a nation far more diverse than Jay would ever acknowledge. In many ways, Self-Evident Truths takes the rights talk of the Declaration of Independence as its jumping-off point. And the book does not entirely diverge from the tried-and-true trope of the unfinished Revolution, which, in the standard apologists' version, reads like this: the Founders left many inequalities and injustices unchallenged, but they, sometimes purposefully and sometimes inadvertently, laid the groundwork for those shortcomings to be addressed by future generations. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration did little if anything to confront directly any of a number of forms of persistent inequality—particularly those founded in race and gender—but the use of blanket and inclusive terms in the Revolutionary era's assertions of natural rights and human equality enabled others to expand the scope and scale of the Revolution. Brown's book offers no simple answers along those lines, and it is no apology. He is clear about the ways that white men in the first half of the [End Page 521] nineteenth century "fended off movements to extend equal rights to people of color and to women as they sought exclusive possession of the benefits of the Revolutionary contagion." Those efforts often took the form of deliberate attempts to develop ideas of "natural inequality according to race and sex." Many turned to biology and nature, Brown writes, in their search for "a theory to justify social stratification" (308). Still, Brown agrees with important elements of those who emphasize the idea of the unfinished Revolution, and his reading is persuasive. His account of how ideas of equality had consequences for the American nation between the Revolution and the Civil War is nuanced, deeply informed by recent scholarship, and grounded in many sections in his own research, particularly his work on how judges and juries handled moments where de jure and de facto conceptions of equality did not exactly square up. Indeed, this reads like a senior scholar's meditation on how to grapple with both the failures and the remarkable accomplishments of the American Revolutionary moment—and with the deeds of later generations who sought variously to contain and to extend the radical potential of 1776. Self-Evident Truths covers familiar ground in many places. An early chapter on the emergence of ideas of religious equality, for instance, gives an engaging overview of issues like religious tests for political office and state-level disestablishment in the post-Revolutionary era, with few surprises for anyone familiar with the period. The same can be said regarding sections on the Alien and Sedition Acts, on Dred Scott, on Seneca Falls. One of the reasons Brown is so persuasive in...

The Exile's Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World by Sally McKee

The Exile's Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World by Sally McKee

AntiRacism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution by Devyn Spence Benson

"AntiRacism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution by Devyn Spence Benson." Canadian Journal of History, 52(3), pp. 631–632

Devyn Spence Benson , Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), pp. 332, $29.95, pb.

Devyn Spence Benson , Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), pp. 332, $29.95, pb.

Narrative of an Unfinished Revolution

Narrative of an Unfinished Revolution

Book Review: Finding Feminism: Millennial Activists and the Unfinished Gender Revolution by Alison Dahl Crossley

Book Review: <i>Finding Feminism: Millennial Activists and the Unfinished Gender Revolution</i> by Alison Dahl Crossley

Abortion and Reproductive Justice – The Unfinished Revolution II

Abortion and Reproductive Justice – The Unfinished Revolution II

Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction by Nicholas Barreyre

Reviewed by: Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction by Nicholas Barreyre David K. Thomson Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction. Nicholas Barreyre. Charlottesville. University of Virginia Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8139-3746-6, 336 pp., cloth, $39.50. Any sort of scholarly discussion of Reconstruction must contend with Eric Foner's definitive Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution (1988), now nearly thirty years old. Foner's work masterfully weaves together Republicans' political attempts to assert a new order on the South and the social dynamics at play in a postslavery society. Others have subsequently delved into this narrative always placing race relations at the forefront—and rightly so. That said, some scholars in more recent memory have tried to examine this Reconstruction story by moving into other realms, be it Heather Cox Richardson's excellent West from Appomattox (1998) detailing a more nationalist view of Reconstruction or Gregory Downs's very recent After Appomattox [End Page 422] (2015) examining the larger repercussions of a de facto guerrilla conflict that plagued the South following the Confederate surrender in 1865 until 1871. Nicholas Barreyre's Gold and Freedom can be said to be another work in this vein. Barreyre takes another look at the crucial period of Reconstruction but does so, as the subtitle implies, through the primacy of political economy. Barreyre repeatedly mentions "the spatial dimension of American politics" as a means through which to understand what the author describes as sectionalism, that is, "the geographical expression of antagonistic regional interests in a national framework" (4). Barreyre's chief objective is to demonstrate how much Reconstruction was a national dynamic. By looking at Reconstruction through a more northern lens and the conflict between the Northeast and West (our modern-day Midwest) as illustrative of the role of economic sectionalism in the larger narrative of Reconstruction, Barreyre contends we can have a firmer grasp of this critical period. Economic issues centered around tariff and monetary policy widened the fissure between the two regions of the North to the point that it dramatically affected larger questions surrounding Reconstruction. Race relations, questions over citizenship, and larger issues over southern reform all came to be part of the larger economic debates. Indeed, the author contends that to more properly understand this vital period in American history, it is necessary to understand Reconstruction politics in conjunction with political economy. Reconstruction politics and policies from a political economy standpoint revolved around the triumvirate of bonds, currency (greenbacks), and tariffs. Barreyre understandably dedicates most of his work to examining the rise of Civil War bonds and the rise of a national fiat currency in greenbacks. While both measures were implemented during the war as a means for the federal government to fund the Civil War (to the tune of nearly $3 billion just between these two measures), it was the debates over a return to the gold standard and possible resumption of bonds in greenbacks that generated extensive political debate. These proved to be the larger fiscal issues of Reconstruction that subsequently took on sectional implications within the North. As Barreyre rightly contends, "the sectional idea embodied a political significance that transcended its geographical definition" (104). These debates had national repercussions on larger Reconstruction policies, and it is in this examination that Barreyre is at his strongest. While Barreyre touches on the sectional and national issues of Reconstruction policies on larger notions of political economy, the work could certainly have benefitted from additional voices of the people at large. If this was indeed as divisive a set of issues as Barreyre details, the voices of the greater northern (and indeed southern) populace certainly were commenting in local, regional, and national papers, as well as petitioning members of Congress and writing to individuals at the Department of the Treasury. While the author at times does reference some newspapers commenting on the issue and details extensively the political debates occurring on Capitol Hill, these everyday voices would have further reinforced how these issues affected citizenry throughout the country. Similarly, drawing in the international dimension of these debates—especially as the United States developed an international presence in the Reconstruction era with a Treasury Office in London—would...

Review of: Timothy S. Huebner, Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism

Review of: Timothy S. Huebner, Liberty and Union: The Civil M/ar Era and American Constitutionalism WILLIAM WIECEK The constitutional historian Timothy Huebner has set himself a daunting task in Liberty and Union: to recapitulate within a single volume three “historiographical streams” (p. x) of American constitutional development—a history of the Civil War (and its political antecedents), the constitutional impact of the war and its aftermath in Reconstruction, and African-American history of the era.1 Constitutionalism, as his title indicates, is his central theme: what it is, why it matters, and how it was understood by the American people, including AfricanAmericans and pro-slavery southern whites. Each of Huebner’s three foci merits book-length treat­ ment in its own right; blending all three into a coherent narrative for general readers is a challenge to virtuosity. Huebner pulls it off admirably. There are surprisingly few studies that cover exactly the same ground Huebner does, but they are all classics, which makes his achievement all the more impressive. A generation ago, Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek brought out one of the few studies that replicates Huebner’s subject: Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875 (1982), one of the four constitutional volumes of the New American Nation series. The entire corpus of Harold M. Hyman’s work, but principally A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973), is dedicated to the war and Reconstruction. Laura Edwards’s A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (2015) is an important recent revision of the classical synthesis. All the other landmark studies cover only one part of Huebner’s story. Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer Prize­ winning achievement, What Hath God REVIEW OF LIBERTY AND UNION 119 Wrought: The Transformation of Amer­ ica, 1815-1848 (2007), interprets the antebel­ lum era. David M. Potter’s The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976), another New American Nation series volume, brought the story up to the war. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) covered both the coming of the war and the war itself. William W. Freehling’s two-volume treatment of secession, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (1990) and Secessionists Trium­ phant, 1854-1861 (2007) traced the southern component of the story. John Hope Franklin produced the magisterial account ofthe black experience in From Slavery to Freedom: A History ofAfrican Americans (1947, 8th ed. 2000). Don E. Fehrenbacher followed up his towering The Dred Scott Case: Its Signifi­ cance in American Law and Politics (1978) with his refutation of the neo-Garrisonian critique of the pro-slavery Constitution: The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (2001). Eric Foner’s Reconstruc­ tion: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988, 2014) is the definitive one-volume survey ofthe war’s political and constitutional aftermath. Each of these books has framed the way that we think about the constitutional struggles of the Middle Period, providing the armature on which we structure interpretation and critique today. On purely constitutional matters, the Holmes Devise volumes of Carl B. Swisher (The Taney Period, 1836-1864 [1964]) and Charles Fairman (Reconstruction and Reunion, 1864-88 [1971, 1987]) were respectively dated and monumentally disappointing, and they have had little impact on our interpreta­ tion of the constitutional dimensions of the cataclysmic struggles of 1830-1880. Given this grand corpus of recent scholarship, our parlous times call for a synthesis that will make the constitutional learning of the last half-century accessible in the classroom and for public discourse. Huebner’s work traces the great constitu­ tional themes that have dominated scholarly inquiry since the 1960s. Foremost among these is his foregrounding of African-American experience in this era. He emphasizes African Americans’ contributions to the development ofconstitutional thought and doctrine, as what he calls “the black constitutionaltradition” (pp. 52, 61, 84, 136, 322-323, 419, and passim). With few exceptions (Franklin, Foner), con­ stitutional historians have slighted the contri­ butions of black antebellum thinkers and activists to the development of public law.2 Huebner explores the constitutional ideas...

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Kate Masur (bio), Gregory P. Downs (bio), and Judith Giesberg, Editor 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, at http://journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-reconstruction-studies. 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 [End Page 1] 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. This special issue went into production immediately after the 2016 presidential election, which starkly revealed the significance of Reconstruction-era questions in our own moment. Our hope is that this special issue inspires further discussion and debate about where this era’s future might lie. Kate Masur kate masur is associate professor of History at Northwestern University and author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (2010). Gregory P. Downs gregory p. downs is associate professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and the author of After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (2015) and Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics...

Reconstructing Memory: The Attempt to Designate Beaufort, South Carolina, the National Park Service’s First Reconstruction Unit

Reconstructing MemoryThe Attempt to Designate Beaufort, South Carolina, the National Park Service’s First Reconstruction Unit Jennifer Whitmer Taylor (bio) and Page Putnam Miller (bio) A phone call in 2000 from Bruce Babbitt, then secretary of the interior, to Eric Foner, the nation’s foremost scholar of Reconstruction, planted the seed for a National Park Service (NPS) site in Beaufort, South Carolina, to preserve and interpret the period following the Civil War. Despite strong local backing and a well-organized strategy to support legislation calling for a study to consider establishing the first unit of the NPS devoted primarily to Reconstruction, the effort floundered. This was partly due to the enormous bureaucratic hurdles involved in the creation of a new unit of the NPS, but the primary issue was deep-seated and unresolved attitudes toward race, slavery, and historical memory that manifested themselves through a Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) campaign that proved difficult to overcome when combined with the great gap between the public’s understanding of Reconstruction and that of the scholarly community. The historical profession, with its focus on scholarly writing, has yet to bridge this divide or adequately explain the craft of history, which always involves exploring new source material to present a more complete and accurate understanding of the past. In the twenty-first century, the NPS has lagged far behind historical scholarship in recognizing the significance of Reconstruction in American history. As head of the federal agency with responsibility for the NPS, Babbitt was keenly aware that there were many historic sites within the NPS and throughout the nation that focus on the Civil War but no major sites devoted primarily to the preservation and interpretation of the Reconstruction Era.1 Since 1936, the NPS has been using various versions of a thematic framework to illustrate the broad scope of the American experience and aids in identifying gaps in its presentation of American history.2 The absence of a Reconstruction site was a glaring gap. Babbitt read Eric Foner’s groundbreaking 1988 work Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, which provided fresh insights into a complex and turbulent period. He subsequently telephoned Foner to ask advice about [End Page 39] where the NPS might establish a new unit to interpret Reconstruction, if it were possible to do so. After some contemplation and research, Foner suggested the Sea Islands of South Carolina.3 It was not surprising that Foner’s answer was in Beaufort County. C. Vann Woodward, one of the great scholars of American history, wrote that Reconstruction in the Sea Islands “offers a rare opportunity to review the vast spectacle in miniature and see it in its germinal phase.” In this place, the first formerly enslaved troops saw combat, the first public schools tackled illiteracy, and the community experimented with the wage system, testing it with strikes and bargaining. In addition, freedmen purchased abandoned and confiscated land and participated in politics. Woodward encouraged Willie Lee Rose to undertake the seminal book Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment, which explored in depth all the major themes and players and what Woodward described as “the nuances of change by which a slave became a free man.”4 With the identification of a location rich in Reconstruction history, Babbitt took the next step and invited Foner to accompany him to Beaufort, South Carolina.5 Babbitt and Foner’s December 2000 visit was an important spark in igniting a plan to establish a new unit of the NPS to interpret Reconstruction, but it also illuminated significant challenges that lay ahead. Babbitt could not commit long-term support toward the creation of a new historic site: when he came to Beaufort, about six weeks remained in President Bill Clinton’s term. Yet, Babbitt wanted to do what he could to advance the case for the NPS to become involved in the interpretation of Reconstruction before he left office. On December 7, accompanied by NPS staff and two dozen local historians and leaders, Babbitt and Foner toured the key places in Beaufort County associated with Reconstruction. The group, which represented a diverse coalition of county organizations, ate lunch and discussed possible next steps at Penn Center Historic District...

The Unfinished Task of Grounding Reconstruction’s Promise

The Unfinished Task of Grounding Reconstruction’s Promise Brook Thomas (bio) Reconstruction’s promise certainly exceeded its accomplishments. Yet so long as Reconstruction survived, so did the possibility of change. … Its legacy deserves to survive as an inspiration to those Americans, black and white alike, who insist that the nation live up to the professed ideals of its political culture. —Eric Foner, 1982 In his introduction to a 2006 collection of essays reviewing recent scholarship on Reconstruction, Thomas J. Brown begins: “Once likened to a dark and bloody ground, scholarship on Reconstruction now thrives less as a form of combat than as a collective building on a solid foundation.”1 Brown alludes to Bernard A. Weisberger’s award-winning 1959 essay regretting that, despite calls about twenty years earlier to change the course of Reconstruction study, “the indicated tide of revision has not fully set in.”2 Weisberger brings special attention to the failure of textbooks to incorporate new research and the lack of a synthesis to replace that of Claude Bowers’s popular 1929 The Tragic Era.3 In fact, the most recent synthesis was E. Merton Coulter’s 1947 old-fashioned The South during Reconstruction: 1865–1877.4 The conflict between new research and the portrayal of Reconstruction in textbooks and synthesizing accounts created what Harold M. Hyman still in 1967 called the “dim and gory terrain of Reconstruction studies.”5 Fifty years after Weisberger, Brown could reassuringly assert that Reconstruction scholarship has found a firm footing, because textbooks no longer perpetuate images of corrupt carpetbaggers and childlike African Americans imposing vindictive rule on the South and because in 1988 Eric Foner produced his masterful synthesis: Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution: 1863–1877. Foner’s strength is his ability to link the institutional, economic, and racial forces that preoccupied previous scholars with those leading to westward expansion and urbanization. In the ten years since Brown wrote, however, there have been signs that the foundation Foner provided for a generation is starting to exhibit a few cracks. In the first part of this essay, I claim that much of the power of Foner’s book is generated by productive paradoxes contained in his title. But I also claim that those paradoxes expose potential contradictions that his synthesis cannot completely [End Page 16] contain. The next two parts look at the relationship between his synthesis and past historiography. Six years before his book, Foner laid its groundwork by reviewing past scholarship.6 His account remains the standard one in the field. Nonetheless, in the second part I argue that a close look at that account can also shake the foundation of his synthesis. The major reason Reconstruction was a dark and bloody ground of study was partisan political debates about the proper course of action in the past. There may, however, be deeper reasons why it is so hard to put its scholarship on a solid footing. A synthesis depends on the ability to bring competing forces together in a coherent narrative. But perhaps Reconstruction involved forces that remain in contradiction. If the second part reevaluates some of the partisan debates of the past, the third speculates on how to write a history of the period, with all its contradictions, by revisiting a less well known, but significant, debate about how to relate the era’s facts and forces. I should note from the start that my training is not in history. I am a literary scholar. It might seem pretentious for someone from literature to make claims about Reconstruction historiography. But, as Steven Hahn notes, “historians generally become invested—subtly and not so subtly—in ways of thinking about the past that discourage us from taking full measure of new episodes, new evidence, and new historiographical challenges. Through our training in graduate school and our reading of historical literature, we come to accept certain periodizations, vectors of conflict and change, political cartographies, and ideas about legitimate participants, even if new findings raise doubts about some or all of these.”7 With different training, I hope to offer a somewhat novel perspective. We can start by revisiting a challenge posed shortly after Weisberger’s essay. In “Explicit Data and Implicit...

The World the Civil War Made

The word Reconstruction does not appear in this book's title, by design. The editors' admirable ambitions are set forth in their introduction: to spark an “expansive reimagining” of the post–Civil War era, even as scholars must perforce stand on the shoulders of Eric Foner's magisterial Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (1988) (p. 3). Guiding The World the Civil War Made is the concept of the “stockade state,” referring to the federal government as “located in outposts, often beset and besieged,” and in this light, the editors contend that “enduringly illiberal and chaotic qualities of life” were less flaws of postwar policy than central to the nation's trajectory (ibid.). Among the most compelling contributions is Kidada E. Williams's essay about the trauma suffered by victims of the white violence that flourished in the absence of federal power in the South. The impossibility of resistance, Williams shows, compromised freedpeople's “obligations and responsibilities of freedom” (p. 174). In a fascinating counterpoint, Crystal N. Feimster's equally compelling exposure of black women's willingness to testify about rape—including by white Union soldiers—demonstrates the women's participation in debates about “emerging meanings of freedom” (p. 249). Notably, the withdrawal of federal troops from the South meant the end of protection for these victims.

Making Territory: War, Post‐war and the Entangled Scales of Contested Forest Governance in Mid‐Western Nepal

ABSTRACTRuptures that constitute exceptional events in national politics intersect in different ways with local politics, where more ongoing, continuous processes of both contestation and conservation around natural resource use may persist amidst a turbulent political landscape on other scales. Nepal, with its series of unfinished revolutions, civil war (1996–2006), and recurrently contested process of state (trans‐)formation, is a case in point. Through a study of a contested forest in mid‐western Nepal, this article analyses the entanglement of rupture and realignment of contentious claims to political authority across different scales, as well as the continuities of negotiations over claims to recognition of forest use and citizenship rights. The authors analyse some of the messy and complex practices through which authority to govern forests is claimed and legitimated, and citizenship rights are asserted and defined. They show that while political ruptures caused by the war and post‐war dynamics unsettle and reshuffle the political terrain, claims to citizenship and property rights endure, even if the language and form of the claim are adapted. These claims are embedded within existing jurisdictions but, at the same time, actors lay claims to property and citizenship rights by working across scales and re‐negotiating their boundaries. ‘Making territory’, the authors conclude, is the effect of the entanglement of these different territorial politics and practices.

Book Review: The Island of Memes: Haiti’s Unfinished Revolution

Book Review: <i>The Island of Memes: Haiti’s Unfinished Revolution</i>