Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 17: Realism about Reconstruction vs. Lost Cause ideology

Historian Kevin Levin has a long-running blog called Civil War Memory where he regularly engages with issues related to Lost Cause ideology. He is particularly known for his systematic debunking of the neo-Confederate myth of black Confederate soldiers.

In a post two years ago, he shared some of his thoughts on teaching Reconstruction history, Teaching Reconstruction and “Racial Amnesia” 01/01/2019. He recalled the post in a recent tweet referring to the recent PBS documentary, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War.

I really enjoyed the focus last night on DuBois, whose *Black Reconstruction in America* (1935) was decades ahead of its time. Here is a blog post I wrote some time ago to help place his book and textbooks today in historical context. https://t.co/miS2lJDVIo #ReconstructionPBS

— Kevin M. Levin (@KevinLevin) April 17, 2019

In his 2017 post, he recommends teachers to use the selections from history books included by W.E.B. DuBois in his Reconstruction book:

Students will likely be surprised by many of the historical claims made in these textbooks. Start by making sure they have some understanding of Jim Crow culture in the 1930s. From there, ask your students to do the following:

List some of the most significant differences with how their own sources interpret Reconstruction.

• Ask students to consider the roles that African Americans performed both during the Civil War as soldiers and activists and as politicians throughout Reconstruction.
• Have students reflect on why this history had become so distorted or forgotten entirely by the 1930s.
• Have students reflect on why this history had become so distorted or forgotten entirely by the 1930s. To what extent did this history serve to justify the political and racial oppression during the Jim Crow Era[?]