The Reconstruction period isn’t just a distant, bygone time. It’s additionally a dwelling historical past.
That is an version of Time-Journey Thursdays, a journey by The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the current and floor pleasant treasures. Enroll right here.
It’s Black Historical past Month once more. And this February is our quadrennial Tremendous Black Historical past Month, the place we get a complete further leap day to squeeze in some bonus Black historical past. That’s roughly 4 p.c extra Black historical past than normal, greater than sufficient time for one sitting of the 1998 NBC miniseries The Temptations. Or, for those who’ve seen sufficient of Otis, maybe you would possibly spend the time studying a few of The Atlantic’s archive.
Over the previous few years, we at The Atlantic have been working to think about and recontextualize the journal’s protection of Black of us—each the locations the place the journal bought it proper and the place it didn’t. Frankly, the file has usually been blended, and the archive is thinner in lots of locations than is perhaps anticipated. However one notable second in Black historical past that captured The Atlantic’s creativeness was the Reconstruction period, the publish–Civil Battle interval through which Black freedpeople and their allies sought to create a very free nation.
The Atlantic was based as an abolitionist journal, and a few of our earliest works by Black authors involved the monumental process of Reconstruction. In these pages, the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass referred to as for a complete restructuring of society and demanded the poll for Black males. In 1864, Charlotte Forten Grimké chronicled her work on St. Helena Island, in South Carolina, aiding freedpeople and criticizing “those that, North in addition to South, taunt the coloured race with inferiority whereas they themselves use each means of their energy to crush and degrade them.”
For our December 2023 challenge, “To Reconstruct the Nation,” we wished to honor works reminiscent of these and likewise interpret the that means of the Reconstruction period in the present day, when most of the nation’s largest authorized and political battles are centered on the Fourteenth Modification, adopted in 1868 because the central Reconstruction modification. We additionally wished to look at the situations when The Atlantic fell quick, together with a collection of 1901 articles through which distinguished historians reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson lamented Reconstruction as a mistake. In the end, this journal challenge thought-about the Reconstruction period not as a distant, bygone time however as dwelling historical past. The fullness of that dwelling historical past gives a radical sense of chance anchored by the desires of Black freedpeople themselves. We may use just a little of that sense of chance in the present day.
Your Studying Record
By Anna Deavere Smith
A play of previous and current
Why Is America Afraid of Black Historical past?
By Lonnie G. Bunch III
Nobody ought to worry a historical past that asks a rustic to dwell as much as its highest beliefs.
By Dara T. Mathis
How one photographer documented the disappearing panorama of Houston’s Fourth Ward
The Accomplice Normal Whom All of the Different Confederates Hated
By Eric Foner
James Longstreet grew to become a champion of Reconstruction. Why?
How Reconstruction Created American Public Schooling
By Adam Harris
Freedpeople and their advocates persuaded the nation to embrace education for all.
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