It is a period of history absolutely essential for understanding how we got to where we are, which is often not taught at all to schoolchildren.
It began with Black elected legislators and city council members and increased Black economic activity and equality and integration. It ended with the return of de facto Black serfdom and disenfranchisement in the South. And that's when they started putting up the statues. (Who is "they"? It wasn't Black people putting up the statues, was it? So who won and who lost?)
Heather Cox Richardson (who has gained recognition lately with her daily posts on politics) is actually a historian, her book is titled "How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America"
Here's a New Yorker article by Adam Gopnick with the same title, which is actually a review of a different book by Henry Louis Gates. It gives you an overview of how Reconstruction went.
> One mistake the North made was to allow the Confederate leadership to escape essentially unscathed. Lincoln’s plea for charity and against malice was admirable, but it left out the third term of the liberal equation: charity for all, malice to none, and political reform for the persecutors. The premise of postwar de-Nazification, in Germany, was a sound one: you had to root out the evil and make it clear that it was one, and only then would minds change. The gingerly treatment of the secessionists gave the impression—more, it created the reality—that treason in defense of slavery was a forgivable, even “honorable,” difference of opinion. Despite various halfhearted and soon rescinded congressional measures to prevent ex-Confederate leaders from returning to power, many of them didn’t just skip out but skipped right back into Congress.
These are the people who had the resources and power to put up those statues...
Thank you for the explanation, I see what you mean.
I wouldn't describe it as the South "winning", but the North clearly didn't solidify the win quickly enough. I wonder whether that was a bad idea, or whether it came from some real fragility of the North's win, or the fact that it was a civil rather than a foreign win?
It is a period of history absolutely essential for understanding how we got to where we are, which is often not taught at all to schoolchildren.
It began with Black elected legislators and city council members and increased Black economic activity and equality and integration. It ended with the return of de facto Black serfdom and disenfranchisement in the South. And that's when they started putting up the statues. (Who is "they"? It wasn't Black people putting up the statues, was it? So who won and who lost?)
Heather Cox Richardson (who has gained recognition lately with her daily posts on politics) is actually a historian, her book is titled "How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America"
Here's a New Yorker article by Adam Gopnick with the same title, which is actually a review of a different book by Henry Louis Gates. It gives you an overview of how Reconstruction went.
> One mistake the North made was to allow the Confederate leadership to escape essentially unscathed. Lincoln’s plea for charity and against malice was admirable, but it left out the third term of the liberal equation: charity for all, malice to none, and political reform for the persecutors. The premise of postwar de-Nazification, in Germany, was a sound one: you had to root out the evil and make it clear that it was one, and only then would minds change. The gingerly treatment of the secessionists gave the impression—more, it created the reality—that treason in defense of slavery was a forgivable, even “honorable,” difference of opinion. Despite various halfhearted and soon rescinded congressional measures to prevent ex-Confederate leaders from returning to power, many of them didn’t just skip out but skipped right back into Congress.
These are the people who had the resources and power to put up those statues...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/how-the-south-...