Was The Reconstruction A Success
Successes and Failures of Reconstruction Agree Many Lessons
Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia Academy, is the author of many works on American history, including "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution" and, near recently, "Gateway to Freedom: The Subconscious History of the Underground Railroad."
Updated May 26, 2015, 6:47 AM
Reconstruction was an effort to reunite a nation shattered by civil war, build a new lodge in the Due south on the ashes of slavery, and bring into being for the offset fourth dimension in our history an interracial democracy. Nevertheless this remarkable moment barely exists in Americans' historical retentiveness.
Reconstruction and its aftermath remind us that rights in the Constitution are not self-enforcing, and that our liberties can never exist taken for granted.
The successes and failures of Reconstruction hold many lessons for our own time. The era reminds united states of america that the liberation of four million people from chains did non suddenly erase the deep racial prejudices born of slavery, nor clinch lasting political or economic equality for the former slaves. All the same Reconstruction as well points to the possibility of moving beyond racism toward a more than just gild. That white Republicans, many of whom shared their society'south racial prejudices, nonetheless rewrote the nation's laws and Constitution to incorporate the ideal of equal citizenship should exist inspiring in our ain fraught times. And the mobilization of former slaves to demand their rights as Americans is an example of how ordinary people can help to modify history.
Reconstruction poses a challenge to Americans' historical understanding because we prefer stories with happy endings. Unfortunately, the overthrow of the South's biracial governments, achieved in part by terrorist violence, was followed by a long menses of legally enforced white supremacy. Yet this itself offers a timely lesson – that there is nothing inevitable or predetermined in the onward march of freedom and equality. Reconstruction and its aftermath remind u.s. that rights in the Constitution are not self-enforcing, and that our liberties tin can never exist taken for granted.
Reconstruction has long been misrepresented, or merely neglected, in our schools, and different Confederate generals and founders of the Ku Klux Klan, few if any monuments exist to the blackness and white leaders of that era. Fortunately, the National Park Service has only announced an initiative to identify ways of bringing attending to Reconstruction in its historical sites. This is an of import first pace in making Reconstruction part of Americans' historical cocky-consciousness.
Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.
Was The Reconstruction A Success,
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/05/26/how-should-americans-remember-reconstruction/successes-and-failures-of-reconstruction-hold-many-lessons
Posted by: christoffersothemnioncy64.blogspot.com
0 Response to "Was The Reconstruction A Success"
Post a Comment