After the Civil War, the founders’ mistrust of strong federal government yielded to radical Republicans’ demands for a central government powerful enough to protect the newly-won liberties of freedmen.
Read James MacPherson’s: RECONSTRUCTION: THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION
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Reconstruction may be one of the most misunderstood eras in American history. Versions of the era like the early motion picture Birth of a Nation (1915) and the novel Gone With the Wind (1936) — which was made into one of the best-loved American movies of all time — popularized a view of the Old South as a genteel society of gallant aristocrats, a lost world shattered by Northern violence. These myths, of course, ignored the injustices of slavery, the era’s rampant racism, and the shocking violence of the time. They also missed the significance of the era’s advances in civil rights and justice.
Historians review some myths and misconceptions about the Reconstruction era.
Q&A: The Myths of Reconstruction
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It was over a lunch of Confederate fried steak in Columbia, S.C., that I realized something crucial about North and South. A passport ought to be required to travel from one to the other. Despite decades of economic and cultural homogenization, the regions remain as different as basketball and NASCAR. That thought occurred when my lunch partner, a man named Chris Sullivan, told me this: “To say the War Between the States was about slavery is like saying the Revolutionary War was about tea.” And he meant it, sure as the pear trees bloom in sun-washed Columbia, the South is rising once again.
Read the rest of the article Ghosts of the South from Time Magazine
and respond on this sheet
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