Perhaps no period of United States history has received as much reexamination in the past fifteen years as Reconstruction. The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 led some commentators to proclaim that the country had entered a newly enlightened, “post-racial” era. Yet political, social, and economic forces have further emphasized the ways that systemic racism is embedded in nearly every aspect of American life, most damningly in a resurgence of white supremacist rhetoric and anti-Black violence. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) seeks to contextualize these challenges in its current focus exhibition, in which the present-day ramifications of Reconstruction hold equal weight with the people and events of the era itself.
Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies immediately establishes its narrative perspective by using the word reconstruct as a verb, signaling that Reconstruction was not a static event that happened to formerly...
University of California Press