“Studying works on Reconstruction . . . can provide a fairly clear notion of the problems confronting the periods in which historians lived but not always as clear a picture of Reconstruction itself.”

—John Hope Franklin

In a speech delivered in front of the American Historical Association in 1979, association president and Howard University history professor John Hope Franklin declared, “It may be said that every generation since 1870 has written the history of the Reconstruction era. And what historians have written tells as much about their own generation as about the Reconstruction period itself.” Franklin was speaking from experience; his 1961 landmark work Reconstruction: After the Civil War, which has helped shape interpretations of Reconstruction for more than four decades, was informed by the civil rights movement that developed after World War II. In Franklin’s time black Americans were seeking to regain some of the political...