HIS 356K Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: White Supremacy, White Southerners, Double Bind
Document Summary
From last time: what is at stake in determining history"s main currents? . American history is required to teach patriotism: whoever writes history has power. Why reconstruction is so significant: conflicting definitions of freedom, memories of the past, and visions for the future. Racial and economic justice in a diverse society. The events and meaning of reconstruction would remain controversial. Unless black people got the vote, whites would use the system to get things back to the days of slavery. They wanted land, equality, independence from white power and the right to develop their own economy. Said reconstruction is the great work of the national regeneration : white southerners: retribution and the lost cause. They wanted local and regional autonomy, states rights and white supremacy. Richmond dispatch, dec. 9, 1865 the past and the present . South had sacrificed itself for states rights question. Flourished in long-running myth of the lost cause + mythic history of reconstruction.
