Freedoms Gained and Lost
ByPublisher Description
Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America’s Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.
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About Adam H. Domby
Adam H. Domby is an associate professor of history at Auburn University. He is the author of The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). He co-edited Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). In 2018 he won the John T. Hubble Prize for the best article in Civil War History.
Other books by Adam H. Domby
Simon Lewis
Simon Lewis has been teaching African and Third World Literature at the College of Charleston since 1996. A former long-time director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) program at the College, Dr. Lewis is the coeditor of three volumes of essays in USC Press’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World series: The Fruits of Exile: Central European Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism, Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans, and The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War. He is also the author of two monographs on African literature and numerous refereed articles primarily on South African writers. He was recognized in 2021 with a Governor’s Award in the Humanities from South Carolina.
Other books by Simon Lewis
Bruce E. Baker
Bruce E. Baker is Reader in American History at Newcastle University. He is the author of What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (2007) and coeditor of After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South (2013); he has also written several other books and articles covering Reconstruction, labor history, lynching, and the cotton trade.
Adam H. Domby
Adam H. Domby is an associate professor of history at Auburn University. He is the author of The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). He co-edited Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). In 2018 he won the John T. Hubble Prize for the best article in Civil War History.
Other books by Adam H. Domby
Don H. Doyle
Don H. Doyle is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is known for his numerous books, including Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha and The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. He is currently working on an international history of Reconstruction.
Other books by Don H. Doyle
Brian K. Fennessy
Brian K. Fennessy received his PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is now a visiting assistant professor at the University of Richmond. His current project is on former Confederates who joined the Republican Party during Reconstruction.
Michael Fitzgerald
Michael W. Fitzgerald is Professor of History at St. Olaf College. He is the author of The Union League Movement in the Deep South, Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, Splendid Failure, and, most recently, Reconstruction in Alabama (2017).
Hilary N. Green
Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. A distinguished scholar, her research explores the intersections of race, memory, and education in the post–Civil War American South. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890, co-author of the NPS-OAH Historic Resource Study of African American Schools in the South, 1865–1900, and co-editor of The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (Fordham).
Ethan Kytle
Ethan J. Kytle is Professor of History at California State University, Fresno. His latest book, coauthored with Blain Roberts, is Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (2018). Dr. Kytle’s work has also appeared in the Journal of Southern History, American Nineteenth-Century History, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Oxford American.
Simon Lewis
Simon Lewis has been teaching African and Third World Literature at the College of Charleston since 1996. A former long-time director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) program at the College, Dr. Lewis is the coeditor of three volumes of essays in USC Press’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World series: The Fruits of Exile: Central European Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism, Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans, and The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War. He is also the author of two monographs on African literature and numerous refereed articles primarily on South African writers. He was recognized in 2021 with a Governor’s Award in the Humanities from South Carolina.
Other books by Simon Lewis
Holly Pinheiro
Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. is Assistant Professor of African American history in the History Department at Furman University. He has published articles in Jeronimo Zurita and the Journal of American Nineteenth-Century History. He is currently finalizing his monograph The Families’ Civil War: Northern African American Soldiers and The Fight for Racial Justice.
Other books by Holly Pinheiro
Sergio Pinto-Handler
Sergio Pinto-Handler holds a PhD in Latin American History from Stony Brook University. His research examines abolitionism in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College.
Shannon Smith
Shannon M. Smith is Associate Professor of History at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota, where she teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction in American culture, gender and race in US history, and protest and rebellion. She holds a PhD from Indiana University and a master’s degree from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Other books by Shannon Smith
Felicity Turner
Felicity Turner is currently Associate Professor of History at Georgia Southern University; she received her PhD in history from Duke University in 2010. Her research has been supported by postdoctoral fellowships from the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University, Bloomington; the University of Wisconsin Law School; and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Samuel Watts
Samuel Watts received his Ph.D. from The University of Melbourne, researching and writing about Black experiences of Reconstruction in the urban Deep South. He is the managing editor of ANZASA Online, writes for the Australian Book Review, and was recently awarded the Wyselaskie Scholarship for History award.
Other books by Samuel Watts
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