Booknotes: Requiem for Reconstruction

New Arrival:

• Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation by Robert D. Bland (UNC Press, 2026).

From the description: "Often remembered as a period of failed progressive change that gave way to Jim Crow and second-class citizenship, Reconstruction’s tragic narrative has long overshadowed the resilience and agency of African Americans during this time."

Robert Bland's Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation weaves that larger narrative together primarily through the words and actions of a select group of contemporary "leaders, educators, and journalists" (ex. "South Carolina congressman Robert Smalls, Judge William Whipper, writer Frances Rollin, and others") who helped shape its course and historical remembrance. In his "cultural history of the political world" in which these individuals operated, Bland argues that the region under consideration, the South Carolina Lowcountry, was a "pivotal site of Black countermemory in the half-century that followed the removal of federal troops" (pg. 3).

More from the description: Framed as a "countermemory of Reconstruction," Bland's study "traces the impact of the Reconstruction generation—Black Americans born between 1840 and 1870 who saw Reconstruction as a defining political movement and worked to preserve its legacy by establishing a new set of historical practices such as formulating new archives, shaping local community counternarratives, using the Black press to inform national audiences about Southern Republican politics, and developing a framework to interpret the recent past’s connection to their present world."