Reconstruction

In the history of the United States, "Reconstruction" was the period after the American Civil War when the southern states of the breakaway Confederate States of America|Confederacy were reintegrated into the United States of America.

Legacy of Reconstruction

The legacy of Reconstruction was initially viewed as a failure. Following Reconstruction and the perpetuation of segregation, the romanticized idea of the South was born, and many in the New South began decrying the corruption during Reconstruction. Works of this period (such as The Klansmen and Gone With The Wind) glorified the white supremacist and Redeemer governors, as well as vigilante organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, and romanticized the true nature of antebellum South, especially in regards to the treatment and disposition of African-Americans. These sentiments found outlets in the Twentieth Century in the form of D.W. Griffith's silent movie (based on The Klansmen), Birth of A Nation, as well as in the work produced by the Dunning School of History at Columbia University, which viewed Reconstruction as a failure because it gave freedom and rights to blacks, and that these developments should never have come to pass (this school of historical thought provided much justification for the segregation of the South and for Jim Crow laws). However, by the middle to latter part of the Twentieth Century, historians, most notably, Eric Foner (who ironically was working with funds from the William Archibald Dunning Grant) rewrote and revised the historical views on Reconstruction, shedding new light on the lives of the people both black and white who participated in this exciting point in American history. This new research, highlighted the real tragedy of Reconstruction, that it failed not because blacks were incapable of governing, but because the civil rights and equalities granted during this period were but a passing temporary development, and that these rights would ultimately be removed, only to wait until the 1950s and 1960s, for the rise of the Civil Rights Movement what is sometimes referred to as "Second Reconstruction."

Related Topics:
Ku Klux Klan - African-Americans - Twentieth Century - D.W. Griffith's - Birth of A Nation - Jim Crow laws - Civil Rights Movement

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