![]() ![]() Just as “Lost Cause” mythology long disguised the centrality of slavery as the cause for the Civil War, supplanted by a false narrative of States’ Rights, so too did it invent a fiction of an occupied postwar south given to dangerous excess, exploited by rapacious northern “carpetbaggers,” in league with venal local “scalawags,” and hapless illiterate blacks manipulated to do their bidding and trample the rights of their former masters. ![]() ![]() ![]() Perhaps no period in American history has been so utterly erased or misremembered as the Reconstruction era, that decade after the Civil War when the federal government sought to ensure that millions of African Americans, most of them former slaves, could enjoy basic civil and political rights. as the first National Park Service unit dedicated to the story of Reconstruction. Panelists observed that while there are more than seventy NPS parks focused on the Civil War, there were none that explored the war’s critical aftermath until January 2017 when-in one of his final acts before leaving office-President Obama issued a proclamation that designated a site in Beaufort County, S.C. in January 2018 was entitled “The Struggle to Commemorate Reconstruction in National Parks,” which featured former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, as well as a number of noted historians. One of the sessions that I sat in on when I attended the American Historical Association (AHA) Annual Meeting in D.C. ![]()
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