The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction

The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction PDF Author: Paul Alan Cimbala
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
They offer insight into the actions and thoughts, not only of the agents, but also of the southern planters and the former slaves, as both of these groups learned how to deal with new responsibilities, new advantages, and altered relationships."--BOOK JACKET.

The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction

The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction PDF Author: Paul Alan Cimbala
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description
They offer insight into the actions and thoughts, not only of the agents, but also of the southern planters and the former slaves, as both of these groups learned how to deal with new responsibilities, new advantages, and altered relationships."--BOOK JACKET.

Under the Guardianship of the Nation

Under the Guardianship of the Nation PDF Author: Paul A. Cimbala
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
The Freedmen's Bureau was an extraordinary agency established by Congress in 1865, born of the expansion of federal power during the Civil War and the Union's desire to protect and provide for the South's emancipated slaves. Charged with the mandate to change the southern racial "status quo" in education, civil rights, and labor, the Bureau was in a position to play a crucial role in the implementation of Reconstruction policy. The ineffectiveness of the Bureau in Georgia and other southern states has often been blamed on the racism of its northern administrators, but Paul A. Cimbala finds the explanation to be much more complex. In this remarkably balanced account, he blames the failure on a combination of the Bureau's northern free-labor ideology, limited resources, and temporary nature--as well as deeply rooted white southern hostility toward change. Because of these factors, the Bureau in practice left freedpeople and ex-masters to create their own new social, political, and economic arrangements.

Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau

Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau PDF Author: Mary Farmer-Kaiser
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823232115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Established by congress in early 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands--more commonly known as "the Freedmen's Bureau"--assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the post-Civil War South. Although it was called the Freedmen's Bureau, the agency profoundly affected African-American women. Until now remarkably little has been written about the relationship between black women and this federal government agency. As Mary Farmer-Kaiser clearly demonstrates in this revealing work, by failing to recognize freedwomen as active agents of change and overlooking the gendered assumptions at work in Bureau efforts, scholars have ultimately failed to understand fully the Bureau's relationships with freedwomen, freedmen, and black communities in this pivotal era of American history.

Too Great a Burden to Bear

Too Great a Burden to Bear PDF Author: Christopher B. Bean
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823268764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
This Reconstruction Era historical study of the Freedman’s Bureau in Texas offers a personal view of the lives, struggles and misconceptions of its agents. Formed at the close of the Civil War to provide assistance to formerly enslaved people, the Freedmen’s Bureau became the epicenter of the debate about Reconstruction. Though its agents in Texas were vitally important, historians have only recently begun to focus on their operations. Specifically addressing the historiographical debates concerning the character of the Bureau and its sub-assistant commissioners (SACs), Too Great a Burden to Bear sheds new light on the work and reputation of these agents. Focusing on the agents on a personal level, author Christopher B. Bean reveals the type of man Bureau officials believed qualified to oversee the Freedpeople’s transition to freedom. This work shows that each agent, moved by his sense of fairness and ideas of citizenship, gender, and labor, represented the agency’s policy in his subdistrict. These men further ensured the Freedpeople’s right to an education and right of mobility, rights fiercely contested by many in the South.

Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era

Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era PDF Author: Ross A. Webb
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813150345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Although Kentucky was not subject to reconstruction as such, the period of readjustment following the Civil War was a troubled one for the Commonwealth. Violence begun by guerillas continued for years. In addition, white "Regulators" tried to cow the new freedmen and keep them in a perpetual state of fearful submission that would assure the agricultural labor supply. Their attacks produced exactly the effects whites least desired: the blacks became all the more determined to leave the countryside, and the federal government imposed the Freedmen's Bureau to protect the former slaves. Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era shows how this and other forms of federal intervention angered even the most loyal white citizens, leading to Kentucky's hostility to the national administration and consequent reputation as a state dominated by ex-Confederates. Gradually, however, things began to change, as hopes for future prosperity outweighed past disappointments. While the old feuds were not healed during this period, many of the state's leaders shifted their attention to more productive matters, and the way was opened to eventual reconciliation.

Bound in Wedlock

Bound in Wedlock PDF Author: Tera W. Hunter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979249
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Winner of the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize Winner of the Mary Nickliss Prize Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, but it does not end there. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents, and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage. “A remarkable book... Hunter has harvested stories of human resilience from the cruelest of soils... An impeccably crafted testament to the African-Americans whose ingenuity, steadfast love and hard-nosed determination protected black family life under the most trying of circumstances.” —Wall Street Journal “In this brilliantly researched book, Hunter examines the experiences of slave marriages as well as the marriages of free blacks.” —Vibe “A groundbreaking history... Illuminates the complex and flexible character of black intimacy and kinship and the precariousness of marriage in the context of racial and economic inequality. It is a brilliant book.” —Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother

Educational Reconstruction

Educational Reconstruction PDF Author: Hilary N. Green
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823270130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Tracing the first two decades of state-funded African American schools, Educational Reconstruction addresses the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians, and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. Hilary Green proposes a new chronology in understanding postwar African American education, examining how urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city and state partners. Revealing the significant gains made after the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this study reevaluates African American higher education in terms of developing a cadre of public school educator-activists and highlights the centrality of urban African American protest in shaping educational decisions and policies in their respective cities and states.

The Record of Murders and Outrages

The Record of Murders and Outrages PDF Author: William A. Blair
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469663465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
After the Civil War’s end, reports surged of violence by Southern whites against Union troops and Black men, women, and children. While some in Washington, D.C., sought to downplay the growing evidence of atrocities, in September 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard requested that assistant commissioners in the readmitted states compile reports of “murders and outrages” to catalog the extent of violence, to prove that the reports of a peaceful South were wrong, and to argue in Congress for the necessity of martial law. What ensued was one of the most fascinating and least understood fights of the Reconstruction era—a political and analytical fight over information and its validity, with implications that dealt in life and death. Here William A. Blair takes the full measure of the bureau’s attempt to document and deploy hard information about the reality of the violence that Black communities endured in the wake of Emancipation. Blair uses the accounts of far-flung Freedmen’s Bureau agents to ask questions about the early days of Reconstruction, which are surprisingly resonant with the present day: How do you prove something happened in a highly partisan atmosphere where the credibility of information is constantly challenged? And what form should that information take to be considered as fact?

The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Texans

The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Texans PDF Author: Barry A. Crouch
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292789661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A look at the agency’s attempts to deliver justice to the Texas black community following the Civil War. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused documentation in the National Archives, this book offers new insights into the workings of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the difficulties faced by Texas Bureau officials, who served in a remote and somewhat isolated area with little support from headquarters. “[The] episodes in Texas Reconstruction history that Mr. Crouch relates, perhaps do more than broad generalizations to explain why the Freedmen’s Bureau failed, and how we lost the peace after the Civil War.” —New York Times Book Review “Crouch skillfully presents the Freedmen’s Bureau as one of the most unique, misunderstood, and maligned ad hoc reform agencies ever devised by a democratic government in the name of social and political freedom and equality.” —East Texas Historical Journal “Breaks new ground in Reconstruction history. [Crouch’s] study is among the first on the bureau in Texas and the first to focus on the subdistrict agent, the subassistant commissioner.” —Journal of Southern History

Sick from Freedom

Sick from Freedom PDF Author: Jim Downs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199911541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.