Walt Whitman's prolific Reconstruction project has remained the most uncultivated decade in Whitman studies for over a century. This first book-length analysis seeks to point the way for a needed recovery of Whitman's 1865-1876 publications by embedding them in the legislative discourse of black emancipation and its stormy aftermath. The supposed absence of race relations in Whitman's post-war texts has recently become a source of curiosity and denunciation. However, from 1865 to 1876, the Congressional 'workshop' was seeking to forge interracial civil rights legislation through surveillance...
Walt Whitman's prolific Reconstruction project has remained the most uncultivated decade in Whitman studies for over a century. This first book-length...
