For this week’s post, I’d like to say a bit more about what historians were writing about Reconstruction in the 1960s. As I argued last week, this discourse is difficult to separate from the then-prevailing discussions about African Americans and the future of American politics after the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Memory of Reconstruction, which in the late 1960s was entangled with both the changes in the historiography of that era and the rise of Black Studies, became a way for African American scholars to remind their readers that America had a chance to finish the job of the first Read more