The National Park Service has commissioned the first comprehensive review of nationally significant historical sites of the Reconstruction Era. The project, a National Historic Landmark Theme Study on the U.S. Reconstruction Era, 1861-1898, will bring attention to the history of the period of Emancipation and Reconstruction after the Civil War and identify landmarks that help tell the nation’s story.
The new 1876 Constitution, which passed as post-Civil War Reconstruction was ending, included a provision for financing a new capitol building.
“The Reconstruction Era is a crucial piece of the nation’s history, with deep ties to the Civil War that reach into the Civil Rights era and beyond. This theme study will identify nationally significant sites and buildings related to the Era of Reconstruction and help educate all Americans about this often-ignored or misunderstood period in our rich history,” Park Service Director Jon Jarvis said in a release.
Reconstruction is one of the most complex, poorly understood, and significant eras in United States history, according to the Park Service. In this pivotal period, four million African Americans, newly freed from bondage, sought to establish schools and communities, while white Southerners faced the challenges of both wartime defeat and slavery’s abolition.
Confronting the question of how the states of the former Confederacy would rejoin the United States of America, Congress entered a period of extraordinarily creative and meaningful policymaking, passing the nation’s first federal civil rights laws and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution.
Such developments were immensely controversial, particularly among white Southerners disappointed by the Confederacy’s defeat and unwilling to accept the new order. By the end of the nineteenth century, Southern states had implemented Jim Crow regimes and disfranchised most African American voters. Congress did little to intervene, and the U.S. Supreme Court followed suit, declaring in 1896 that racial segregation was legal nationwide. The Reconstruction Era is a crucial piece of the nation’s history, with deep ties to two other areas of National Park Service focus: the Civil War and the Civil Rights Era.
The National Historic Landmark Theme Study on Reconstruction is part of a process designed to enhance public understanding of this complex and contested period. Theme studies are an effective way of identifying and nominating properties for preservation because they provide a national historic context and therefore allow for the comparative analysis of properties associated with a specific area of American history.
According to the Park Service, “Historians’ understandings of Reconstruction changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century, but current scholarship on the period has been slow to enter public consciousness. Discredited legends of ‘carpetbaggers,’ ‘scalawags,’ and other corrupt individuals and practices often stand in place of historical fact. By emphasizing the themes of black institution building, violence and civil unrest, enfranchisement and the expansion of democracy, land and labor reform, the expansion of federal power, and the remaking of the South, the Reconstruction theme study will provide a framework for an invigorated public understanding of the period.”
