Synopses & Reviews
A great deal has been written about southern memory centering onthe Civil War, particularly the view of the war as a valiant lost cause. In thischallenging new book Bruce Baker looks at a related, and equally important, aspectof southern memory that has been treated by historians only in passing: Reconstruction. What Reconstruction Meant examines what both white and black SouthCarolinians thought about the history of Reconstruction and how it shaped the waythey lived their lives in the first half of the twentiethcentury.
Baker addresses the dominant whiteconstruct of the dark days of Reconstruction, which was instrumental both inending Reconstruction and in justifying Jim Crow and the disfranchisement of AfricanAmericans in the South, setting the tone for early historians' accounts ofReconstruction. Looking back on the same era, African Americans and their supportersrecalled a time of potential and of rights to be regained, inspiring theircontinuing struggles to change the South.
Bakerdraws on a tremendous range of newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, and publishedmaterials, to show the intricate process by which the white-supremacist memory ofReconstruction became important in the 1890s, as segregation and disenfranchisementtook hold in the South, and how it began to crumble as the civil rights movementgained momentum. Examining the southern memory of Reconstruction, in all its forms, is an essential element in understanding the society and politics of thetwentieth-century South.