History 363A - AmericanReconstruction&Reunion

This course examines the social, political, economic, and cultural history of the era of Reconstruction and Reunion. We will investigate the forces that drove Reconstruction in the North, South, West, and abroad during and after the U.S. Civil War and the destruction of slavery. We will especially attend to conflicts over the meanings of freedom and the workings of democracy among freedpeople, white and black northerners, suffragists, white southerners, western farmers, and Native Americans in the postbellum period. The course concludes with the North's withdrawal from the South, convict leasing, the rise of legal segregation, legal disfranchisement, racial terror lynching, and white sectional reunion during the imperial wars of 1898. As this impossible situation was painstakingly built, African Americans responded in a variety of ways, which we will study in detail. At various points during the semester, we will reflect critically upon the ways in which Reconstruction and Reunion have been remembered and represented in history and popular culture.