Yale professor David W. Blight speaks in Beaufort, South Carolina on Nov. 7 at the official launch of the University of South Carolina Beaufort’s Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era. Reconstruction, in some ways, began in Beaufort and the National Park Service is establishing history programs there to interpret it. This new institute will help with the identification of Beaufort with Reconstruction. According to the new institute’s web site:
The purpose of the Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era (ISRE) is to fulfill the mission of the University of South Carolina Beaufort through programs that grow out of the extraordinary history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, especially the fundamental role played by Beaufort and the South Carolina Lowcountry in that story.
Initially the ISRE will pursue four goals: curriculum enrichment at USCB; K12 instructional outreach to help teachers gain fluency in the historiography and pedagogy related to Reconstruction; community partnerships; and scholarly research, publication, and public events that focus on the social, economic, cultural, and political history of the Reconstruction Era in the United States and the Lowcountry region.
The story of Reconstruction is a tale of a pivotal period in the nation’s history where a generation of African Americans were active agents in shaping the era’s history rather than simply a “problem” confronting white society. The neglected history is one of a period of tremendous and revolutionary accomplishment for former slaves: dozens newly-freed men served in state legislatures and in the US Congress; men and women once considered property formalized longstanding marriages in church services; once illegal, schools for African Americans proliferated in the South; and, no less important or impressive, African Americans went where they pleased, were paid for their labor, and lived without the once-constant fear of arbitrary violence or being sold apart from loved ones.
Moreover, despite lasting but a handful of years and ultimately falling short of reformers’ ambitious initial goals, Reconstruction remains one of the most relevant periods of study for contemporary Americans. A confluence of events including the June 2015 massacre of nine churchgoers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white supremacist who unabashedly touted the main tenets of the Lost Cause, the resulting remoal of the Confederate battle flag from the SC Statehouse grounds, the spotlight social media has shone on continuing racial inequalities through the #blacklivesmatter movement, and the 150th anniversary of Reconstruction have initiated a new thirst for a thorough understanding of the postwar years where echoes of these issues were first debated. There are even suggestions by those both within and outside the academy that a “Third Reconstruction” may be eminent where the lessons of history to offer a vision for the future, one in which a diverse coalition of citizens fight together for racial, social, and economic justice for all Americans. Indeed, the most important issues at the front of American politics today—citizenship and voting rights, the relative power of state and federal governments, proper responses to terrorism—are all “Reconstruction questions.” In the introduction to the most recent edition of his classic book Reconstruction, historian Eric Foner stresses that as long as these matters remain central to our society, so too must an accurate understanding of the Reconstruction era inform those inquiries. These are not simply esoteric pursuits for historians or political scientists, but moral questions at the heart of American society.
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