you have to compare the two secondary sources on Reconstruction. Part 1 Comparin
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you have to compare the two secondary sources on Reconstruction.
Part 1 Comparing and Contrasting Secondary Sources
Two secondary sources, the work of prominent historians from different eras, are included below for you to review. The first piece comes from William Dunning's (1857-1922) Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877, written in 1907. Dunning was born in on the eve of the Civil War to a well-to-do New Jersey family and began his studies at Columbia soon after the end of Reconstruction. He lived during a time when Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy were the unchallenged law of the land, and he wrote some of the first academic texts on Reconstruction. Dunning was such a compelling force in the first half of the twentieth century that the many historians trained and influenced by him are referred to as the "Dunning School." He was particularly hostile to political idealists, a group which, in his mind, included abolitionists and Radical Republicans. Like many of historians of his day, Dunning never questioned his own objectivity. However, later academics and activists have noted that his writings reflect the political beliefs and prejudices of his generation.
Interpretations of Reconstruction have undergone many changes since Dunning's time. The second excerpt, written 101 years later, is from Eric Foner's The Story of American Freedom. Born in 1943, Foner was the son of civil rights activists (one of them a historian) deeply concerned with the plight of African Americans. Foner completed his PhD in 1969 during the height of the civil rights movement. Widely regarded as a leading contemporary historian of Reconstruction, Foner's writing on the period brings together much of the scholarship that has sought to revise "Dunning School" interpretations of Reconstruction, particularly as they described the role of African Americans in American society. Before you begin reading these excerpts, it may be helpful to review Chapter 15 on the transition from President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction Plan to Congressional Reconstruction.
Secondary Source 1
William Dunning, from Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877
It was, indeed, no novelty for the people of the South to be subject to government by the United States army. . . . The reasoning by which the policy of Congress was justified in the North was regarded in the South as founded on falsehood and malice. So far as the "black codes" were concerned, it was pointed out that they could not be alleged as evidences of a tendency to restore slavery or introduce peonage, since the offensive acts had in many of the states been repealed by the legislatures themselves, and in all had been duly superseded by the civil rights act. The much-exploited outrages on freedmen and Unionists were declared to be exaggerated or distorted reports of incidents which any time of social tension must produce among the criminal classes. The rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment was considered as merely a dignified refusal by honorable men to be the instruments of their own humiliation and shame.
Under all these circumstances the southerners felt that the policy of Congress had no real cause save the purpose of radical politicians to prolong and extend their party power by means of negro suffrage. This and this alone was the purpose for which major-generals had been empowered to remodel the state governments at their will, to exercise through general orders the functions of executive, legislature, and courts, and to compel the white people to recognize the blacks as their equals wherever the stern word of military command could reach. It was as inconceivable to the southerners that rational men of the North should seriously approve of negro suffrage per se as it had been in 1860 to the northerners that rational men of the South should approve of secession per se. Hence, in the one case as in the other, a craving for political power was assumed to be the only explanation of an otherwise unintelligible proceeding.
SOURCE Dunning, William. Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877. New York: Harper & Bros., 1907. 109-12.
Secondary Source 2
Eric Foner, from The Story of American Freedom
Rejecting the idea that emancipation implied civil or political equality or opportunities to acquire property or advance economically, rights northerners deemed essential to a free society, most white southerners insisted that blacks must remain a dependent plantation workforce in a laboring situation not very different from slavery. During Presidential Reconstruction—the period from 1865 to 1867 when Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, gave the white South a free hand in determining the contours of Reconstruction—southern state governments enforced this view of black freedom by enacting the notorious Black Codes, which denied blacks equality before the law and political rights and imposed on them mandatory yearlong labor contracts, coercive apprenticeship regulations, and criminal penalties for breach of contract. Through these laws, the South's white leadership sought to ensure that plantation agriculture survived emancipation.
Thus, the death of slavery did not automatically mean the birth of freedom. But the Black Codes so flagrantly violated free labor principles that they invoked the wrath of the Republican North. Southern reluctance to accept the reality of emancipation resulted in a monumental struggle between President Andrew Johnson and the Republican Congress over the legacy of the Civil War. The result was the enactment of laws and constitutional amendments that redrew the boundaries of citizenship and expanded the definition of freedom for all Americans. . . .
Much of the ensuing conflict over Reconstruction revolved around the problem, as Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois put it, of defining "what slavery is and what liberty is." . . . By 1866, a consensus had emerged within the Republican Party that civil equality was an essential attribute of freedom. The Civil War had elevated "equality" to a status in the vocabulary of freedom it had not enjoyed since the Revolution. . . . In a remarkable, if temporary, reversal of political traditions, the newly empowered national start now sought to identify and protect the rights of Americans.
SOURCE Foner, Eric. The Story of American Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. 103-105.
SHORT ANSWER QUESTIONS
Compare the work of these two historians by answering the following questions. Be sure to support your answers with specific examples drawn from the selections by Dunning and Foner.
1. What is the topic of each excerpt? What period of Reconstruction is the author writing about? What groups are examined in American society?
2. Generally, how do you think each author felt about the Reconstruction process? What in each author's writing leads you to believe that this is how the author feels about Reconstruction? How do those feelings—whether positive or negative—affect each author's point of view? How significant are they in each author's point of view?
3. How would you describe the similarities between these two excerpts?
4. What are the major differences in interpretation between the excerpts?
5. What is the main argument each historian makes about the topic? (By argument we mean his interpretation of the meaning and significance of the historical events and the Reconstruction process that they describe.)
6. How do these interpretations compare to that presented in the textbook?
7. These two excerpts were written 101 years apart. How might this have influenced the development of their arguments?
Explanation / Answer
1.The same event in the history is interpreted in different ways by different group of people. The reconstruction period refers to the period between 1865-1877. It was a period of political victory by the northerners while the same period is described as evil and corrupt by the southerners and was called as tragic era by the white southerners. William Dunner describes the details of the difficulties faced by the white southerers during the reconstruction period. It describes the former plantation owners as honourable citizens who always have interest of South in their mind and also describes the confederate soldiers as the heroes. He criticized the Northeners or the white southerners who supported reconstruction and exploited the south for their political gain. He also criticized the federal government infringement on the power of state and described the political leaders as corrupt and incapable and also portrays the mistreatment towards the southerners during this tragic era. Eric Foner also portrays the reconstruction period. In his excerpts whites and blacks of South have been described.
2. William Dunning describes the reconstruction period is the contrasting views of the Northerners by the southerners in the reference to the Black code. He describes the political leaders as corrupt and incapable and scorns the White southerners who support the Northereners. He has strong objection over the infringement policy of federal government on the power of state. The southerners felt humiliation and mistreatment by the northerners. So this was a negative experience from the viewpoint of the William Dunning. Foner described the same event from the view point of white southerners who does not want to free the black people completely and thus the black code was positive to them.
3. Similarity between these two excerpts that both are describing the contrasting views of both Northerners and southerners. Their main focus was on that people in the South cannot accept the north congress.
4. Difference in their excerpts is that while William Dunning describes the struggles of black Southerners. While the Eric Foner portrays the views white of south. They do not want to free the black people in the south completely.
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