Led by a coalition of blacks and whites with funding from congressional radicals, the Union League was a secret society whose express purpose was to bring freedmen into the political arena after the Civil War. Angry and resentful of the lingering vestiges of the plantation system, hundreds of thousands of freedmen joined local chapters, speaking and acting collectively to undermine the residual trappings of slavery in plantation society.
In this impressive work the first full-scale study of the effect the Union League had on the politicization of black freedmen Michael W. Fitzgerald...
Led by a coalition of blacks and whites with funding from congressional radicals, the Union League was a secret society whose express purpose was t...
Splendid Failure describes the skill with which the postwar freedpeople pursued an agenda of racial justice, accurately perceiving that this was the only issue that mattered in the new South. But in acting on this insight-demanding representation in office and greater civil rights protections-they antagonized the Northern support they needed to survive, and fed a gathering racial backlash. Thus, Mr. Fitzgerald argues, Southern Republicans set the stage for the explosion that swept them from power and resulted in Northern acquiescence to the bloody repression of voting rights. The failed...
Splendid Failure describes the skill with which the postwar freedpeople pursued an agenda of racial justice, accurately perceiving that this was the o...
The civil rights revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the literature on Reconstruction in America by emphasizing the social history of emancipation and the hopefulness that reunification would bring equality. Much of this revisionist work served to counter and correct the racist and pro-Confederate accounts of Reconstruction written in the early twentieth century. While there have been modern scholarly revisions of individual states, most are decades old, and Michael W. Fitzgerald s Reconstruction in Alabama is the first comprehensive reinterpretation of that state s...
The civil rights revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the literature on Reconstruction in America by emphasizing the social history of em...
