Reconstruction Period Quotes

During the whole of the Reconstruction period our people throughout the South looked to the Federal Government for everything, very much as a child looks to its mother.

After Obama’s victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states from 2011 to 2015. Following the Tea Party’s triumph in the 2010 elections, half the states in the country, nearly all of them under Republican control—from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania—passed laws making it harder to vote. The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resembled the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-American voters.

We must conclude with a troubling caveat, however. The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow. Racial exclusion contributed directly to the partisan civility and cooperation that came to characterize twentieth-century American politics. The “solid South” emerged as a powerful conservative force within the Democratic Party, simultaneously vetoing civil rights and serving as a bridge to Republicans. Southern Democrats’ ideological proximity to conservative Republicans reduced polarization and facilitated bipartisanship. But it did so at the great cost of keeping civil rights—and America’s full democratization—off the political agenda.

During the whole of the Reconstruction period our people throughout the South looked to the Federal Government for everything, very much as a child looks to its mother. This was not unnatural. The central government gave them freedom, and the whole Nation had been enriched for more than two centuries by the labour of the Negro.

There were moments of racial unity. Lawrence Goodwyn found in east Texas an unusual coalition of black and white public officials: it had begun during Reconstruction and continued into the Populist period. The state government was in the control of white Democrats, but in Grimes County, blacks won local offices and sent legislators to the state capital. The district clerk was a black man; there were black deputy sheriffs and a black school principal. A night-riding White Man’s Union used intimidation and murder to split the coalition, but Goodwyn points to “the long years of interracial cooperation in Grimes County” and wonders about missed opportunities.

[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.

For a country that is famous for exporting democracy across the globe and has branded itself as the shining city on the hill, the United States has a shameful history when it comes to embracing one of its most basic rights at home. In 1787, when the founders ratified the Constitution, only white male property owners could vote in the eleven states of the Union. In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, black men could cast a ballot freely in only five states. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. The remarkably brief Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, when there were twenty-two black members of Congress from the South and six hundred black state legislators, was followed by ninety years of Jim Crow rule. The United States is the only advanced democracy that has ever enfranchised, disenfranchised, and then reenfranchised an entire segment of the population. Despite our many distinctions as a democracy, the enduring debate over who can and cannot participate in it remains a key feature of our national character.

Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?

celebration. Textbook authors present our nation as getting ever better in all areas, from race relations to transportation. The traditional portrayal of Reconstruction as a period of Yankee usurpation and Negro debauchery fits with the upward curve of progress, for if relations were bad in Reconstruction, perhaps not as bad as in slavery but surely worse than what came later, then we can imagine that race relations have gradually been getting better. However, the facts about Reconstruction compel us to acknowledge that in many ways race relations in this country have yet to return to the point reached in, say, 1870. In that year, to take a small but symbolic example, A. T. Morgan, a white state senator from Hinds County, Mississippi, married Carrie Highgate, a black woman from New York, and was reelected.48 Today this probably could not happen, not in Hinds County, Mississippi, or in many counties throughout the United States. Nonetheless, the archetype of progress prompts many white Americans to conclude that black Americans

The aims and ideals of the Soviet revolution inspired the patriotic enthusiasm of millions of people in the 1930s, during World War II, and in the postwar reconstruction period. This explains the Soviet Union's great leap forward, the achievement of a high level of industrial capacity in a very short time, the transformation of the Soviet Union into a major power in terms of science and culture. The historic victory in the Great Patriotic War against Nazism, which was a surprise not only for Hitler but also for the Western democracies is also explained by what we have said above. All this is true. But the historical truth is also that the regime and the system abused the faith of the people in these high ideals, turning them to its own advantage.

The pharaonic era of the country-house technocrats. The dream of an electronic control of things runs up against the traditional stupidity of the masses. Collective demand has never been so elicited, forced or violated as it has in the field of computing. The clash between a philosophical and metaphysical exigency and a present which is no longer in the least philosophical and metaphysical. The clash between a system of representation and a system of simulation. The clash between a thinking of difference and a thinking of indifference. What is the power of indifference? What would an analytics of indifference be like? Torn between a radical indifference and a radical seduction. Postmodemity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination. In terms of periods, it is the end of final evaluations and the movement of transcendence, which are replaced by 'teleonomic' evaluation, in terms of retroaction. Everything is always retroactive, including - and, indeed, particularly including - information. The rest is left to the acceleration of values by technology (sex, body, freedom, knowledge).

Poets of all ages and of all denominations are unanimous in assuring us that there was once a period on this grey earth known as the Golden Age. These irresponsible hards describe it in terms of the vaguest, most poetic splendour, and, apart from the fact, upon which they are all agreed, that the weather was always perfectly charming, we have to reconstruct its characteristics in the main for ourselves.

reconstructions of that period is the fact that subsequently Gallo’s so-called French co-discoverer, Luc Montagnier, had surprisingly indicated that HIV was actually not sufficient to cause AIDS. Montagnier had uncovered evidence that bacteria called mycoplasmas are necessary to stimulate HIV, making mycoplasmas at least a co-factor of AIDS, and possibly even more important than HIV, raising the scandalous question of whether HIV was even the cause of AIDS. Root

All men know that by sheer weight of physical force, the mass of men must in the last resort become the arbiters of human action. But reason, skill, wealth, machines and power may for long periods enable the few to control the many. But to what end? The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist, because we do not believe in men; yet the basis of fact in this disbelief is incredibly narrow. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent human chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation. It is then one's moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots. The rule of the famished, unlettered, stinking mob is better than this and the only inevitable, logical and justifiable return. To escape from ultimate democracy is as impossible as it is for ignorant poverty and crime to rule forever.

Nowadays anthropology is busy with the gathering of chips of stones and of long-forgotten and buried remnants, in order to reconstruct the history of human, physical and social development. Much more important than those remote periods and than the material world, is the history of our intellectual development, to gather all the chips of the human genius, scattered and buried under the ruins of old literatures, and hidden in the popular literature. The youth of the human mind and the poetical reflection of the surrounding world are embodied in these tales and legends.

The eruption of the expression of white supremacist ideology in what increasingly appears to be a determined attempt to roll back the very phenomenon of a black presidency is just one reason that the rise and fall of Reconstruction - and the surge of white supremacy in the former Confederate states fallowing the end of the Civil War - are especially relevant subjects for Americans to reflect upon at this moment in the history of our democracy. In fact, I'd venture that few American historical periods are more relevant to understanding our contemporary racial politics than Reconstruction.

Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture (1540–2093); the dilemma being addressed is how we—the children of the Enlightenment—failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold. Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind—even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2093) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2073–2093).

Chapter 1, “Esoteric Antiquarianism,” situates Egyptian Oedipus in its most important literary contexts: Renaissance Egyptology, including philosophical and archeological traditions, and early modern scholarship on paganism and mythology. It argues that Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies are better understood as an antiquarian rather than philosophical enterprise, and it shows how much he shared with other seventeenth-century scholars who used symbolism and allegory to explain ancient imagery. The next two chapters chronicle the evolution of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies, including his pioneering publications on Coptic. Chapter 2, “How to Get Ahead in the Republic of Letters,” treats the period from 1632 until 1637 and tells the story of young Kircher’s decisive encounter with the arch-antiquary Peiresc, which revolved around the study of Arabic and Coptic manuscripts. Chapter 3, “Oedipus in Rome,” continues the narrative until 1655, emphasizing the networks and institutions, especially in Rome, that were essential to Kircher’s enterprise. Using correspondence and archival documents, this pair of chapters reconstructs the social world in which Kircher’s studies were conceived, executed, and consumed, showing how he forged his career by establishing a reputation as an Oriental philologist. The next four chapters examine Egyptian Oedipus and Pamphilian Obelisk through a series of thematic case studies. Chapter 4, “Ancient Theology and the Antiquarian,” shows in detail how Kircher turned Renaissance occult philosophy, especially the doctrine of the prisca theologia, into a historical framework for explaining antiquities. Chapter 5, “The Discovery of Oriental Antiquity,” looks at his use of Oriental sources, focusing on Arabic texts related to Egypt and Hebrew kabbalistic literature. It provides an in-depth look at the modus operandi behind Kircher’s imposing edifice of erudition, which combined bogus and genuine learning. Chapter 6, “Erudition and Censorship,” draws on archival evidence to document how the pressures of ecclesiastical censorship shaped Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies. Readers curious about how Kircher actually produced his astonishing translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions will find a detailed discussion in chapter 7, “Symbolic Wisdom in an Age of Criticism,” which also examines his desperate effort to defend their reliability. This chapter brings into sharp focus the central irony of Kircher’s project: his unyielding antiquarian passion to explain hieroglyphic inscriptions and discover new historical sources led him to disregard the critical standards that defined erudite scholarship at its best. The book’s final chapter, “Oedipus at Large,” examines the reception of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies through the eighteenth century in relation to changing ideas about the history of civilization.

Console Wars is a narrative account based on information obtained from hundreds of interviews. Re-creating a story of this nature, which draws from the recollections of a multitude of sources, can often lead to inconsistencies; particularly when dealing with industry competitors and especially when dealing with events that took place more than two decades ago. As such, I have re-created the scenes in this book using the information uncovered from my interviews, facts gathered from supporting documents, and my best judgment as to what version most closely fits the documentary record. In certain situations, details of settings and description have been altered, reconstructed, or imagined. Additionally, most of the dialogue in this book has been re-created based on source recollections of content, premise, and tone. Some of the conversations recounted in this book took place over extended periods of time or in multiple locations, but have been condensed, or reorganized in a slightly different manner, while remaining true to the integrity and spirit of all original discussions.

I began to recall my own experience when I was Mercutio’s age (late teens I decided, a year or two older than Romeo) as a pupil at a public school called Christ’s Hospital. This school is situated in the idyllic countryside of the Sussex Weald, just outside Horsham. I recalled the strange blend of raucousness and intellect amongst the cloisters, the fighting, the sport, and general sense of rebelliousness, of not wishing to seem conventional (this was the sixties); in the sixth form (we were called Grecians) the rarefied atmosphere, the assumption that of course we would go to Oxford or Cambridge; the adoption of an ascetic style, of Zen Buddhism, of baroque opera, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Mahler; of Pound, Eliot and e. e. cummings. We perceived the world completely through art and culture. We were very young, very wise, and possessed of a kind of innocent cynicism. We wore yellow stockings, knee breeches, and an ankle length dark blue coat, with silver buttons. We had read Proust, we had read Evelyn Waugh, we knew what was what. There was a sense, fostered by us and by many teachers, that we were already up there with Lamb, Coleridge, and all the other great men who had been educated there. We certainly thought that we soared ‘above a common bound’. I suppose it is a process of constant mythologizing that is attempted at any public school. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a good example. Girls were objects of both romantic and purely sexual, fantasy; beautiful, distant, mysterious, unobtainable, and, quite simply, not there. The real vessel for emotional exchange, whether sexually expressed or not, were our own intense friendships with each other. The process of my perceptions of Mercutio intermingling with my emotional memory continued intermittently, up to and including rehearsals. I am now aware that that possibly I re-constructed my memory somewhat, mythologised it even, excising what was irrelevant, emphasising what was useful, to accord with how I was beginning to see the part, and what I wanted to express with it. What I was seeing in Mercutio was his grief and pain at impending separation from Romeo, so I suppose I sensitised myself to that period of my life when male bonding was at its strongest for me.

The significant relationships of early adulthood are thus construed as the means to an end of individual achievement, and these "transitional figures" must be cast off or reconstructed following the realization of success. If in the process, however, they become, like Dido, an impediment to the fulfillment of the Dream, then the relationship must be renounced, "to allow the developmental process" to continue. This process is defined by Levinson explicitly as one of individuation: "throughout the life cycle, but especially in the key transition periods . . . the developmental process of individuation is going on." The process refers "to the changes in a person's relationships to himself and to the external world," the relationships that constitute his "Life Structure" (p. 195). If in the course of "Becoming One's Own Man," this structure is discovered to be flawed and threatens the great expectations of the Dream, then in order to avert "serious Failure or Decline," the man must "break out" to salvage his Dream. This act of breaking out is consummated by a "marker event" of separation, such as "leaving his wife, quitting his job, or moving to another region" (p. 206). Thus the road to mid-life salvation runs through either achievement or separation.

During the decade following Redemption, the convict population grew ten times faster than the general population: “Prisoners became younger and blacker, and the length of their sentences soared.”20 It was the nation’s first prison boom and, as they are today, those taken prisoner were disproportionately black. After a brief period of progress during Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves, once again, virtually defenseless. The criminal justice system was strategically employed to force African Americans back into a system of extreme repression and control, a tactic that would continue to prove successful for generations to come.

In the aftermath of the [Civil War], we find one of the most hidden eras of US history. And that is the period of Radical Reconstruction. It certainly remains the most radical era in the entire history of the United States of America. And this is an era that is rarely acknowledged in historical texts. We had Black educated officials, the development of public education. As a matter of fact, former slaves fought for the right to public education; that is to say, education that did not cost money as your education here costs. I'll say here parenthetically -- the fight was for noncommodified education. And as a matter of fact white children in the South, poor white children, gained access to education as a direct result of the struggles of former slaves. There were progressive laws passed challenging male supremacy. This is an era that is rarely acknowledged.

It was not the artists' or the politicians' fault, this desolate state of affairs. To a large extent, it was the Soviet Union's fault. In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history—political history and art history—is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites—in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad—and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do. These are the societies of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," or Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We," which preceded it. In Zamyatin's utopia, the guillotine was known as the Machine of the Benefactor, people were known as Numbers, and the power of words was well understood: "Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write treatises, poems, manifestos, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and beauty of the United State," Zamyatin had based his dystopia on the Soviet state he witnessed being constructed. Half a century after this death, real words that corresponded to actual facts and feelings broke through in a sudden, catastrophic flood and brought down the Soviet Union. But that heady period of Russian history was winding down by the time Petya and Nadya were learning to talk. Voina faced a challenge that perhaps exceeded challenges faced by any other artist in history: they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left.

The growing interest in medieval-period reconstruction is vividly legible in the music, cinema listings and television schedules of the late 1960s and early 70s. Besides the BBC Tudor series mentioned earlier – which led to a spin-off cinema version, Henry VIII and his Six Wives, in 1972 – there was Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), centred on Henry’s first wife Anne Boleyn, starring Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold; the Thomas More biopic A Man for All Seasons (1966); Peter O’Toole as Henry II in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968); David Hemmings as Alfred the Great (1969); the hysterical convent of Russell’s The Devils (1971); and future singer Murray Head in a melodramatic retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight (1973). In the same period HTV West made a series of often repeated mud-and-guts episodes of Arthur of the Britons (1972–3), and visionary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini unveiled his earthy adapations of the Decameron (1970) and The Canterbury Tales (1971). From the time of the English Civil War, Ken Hughes cast Richard Harris in his erratic portrait of Cromwell (1970); and the twenty-three-year-old doomed genius Michael Reeves made his Witchfinder General in 1968, in which the East Anglian farmland becomes a transfigured backdrop to a tale of superstition and violent religious persecution in 1645. Period reconstruction, whether in film, television or music, has been a staple of British culture, innate to a mindset that always finds its identity in the grain of the past.

This insight led ultimately to the recognition of what is known as the Indo-European language family, a group of hundreds of historically related languages, both living and dead, covering a geographic range that stretches from the Indian subcontinent to Iceland. It had, of course, long been understood that there were relationships among languages. Latin and Greek show many similarities; the Romance languages are obviously a group; Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages are all clearly related. But the idea that linguistic relationships might go far beyond this and include languages that seem, on the surface, to have no family resemblance whatsoever—Bengali, Manx, and Armenian, for example—was truly electrifying, as was the idea of a single protolanguage from which this great diversity might have sprung. In Europe, this hypothetical ancestral language, known as Proto-Indo-European, was reconstructed during a period of intense linguistic activity in the nineteenth century by scholars in England, Denmark, France, and Germany (among the field’s early pioneers was one of the fairy-tale-collecting Brothers Grimm), using a methodology that is still practiced today.

The blues emerge immediately after the overthrow of Reconstruction. During this period, unmediated African American voices were routinely silenced through the imposition of a new regime of censorship based on exile, assassination and massacre. The blues became an alternative form of communication, analysis, moral intervention, observation, celebration for a new generation that had witnessed slavery, freedom, and unfreedom in rapid succession between 1860 and 1875. Perhaps no other generation of a single ethnic group in the United States, except for Native Americans, witnessed such a tremendous tragedy in such a short period of time. Performer Cash McCall described the blues as the almost magical uncorking of the censored histories of countless people, places and events: Well, in the old days, you see, you weren’t allowed to express your feelings all that much. A lot of stuff was bottled up inside. Coming up from the old days until now … You can’t explain it in a conversation so the best way to do it is to sing.33 On the other hand, guitarist Willie Foster described them as the irrepressible voice of daily anguish: The black folks got the blues from working … You work all day long, you come home sometimes you didn’t have

Tieken has suggested, on the basis of the problems we have outlined, that all the Sangam poems in the major anthologies were composed to order by poets who were perfectly aware of the fictive nature of their subject (tuṟai) and its context. Thus eighth- or ninth-century poets at the Pandya court, in Tieken’s reconstruction, deliberately composed poems with an internal speaker addressing a far more ancient hero or patron—as if a poet today were to adopt the persona of, say, Christopher Marlowe writing verses for Queen Elizabeth. But there is no need to conjure up such a scenario, with early-medieval court poets busy composing thousands of poems deliberately retrojected into the distant past, using conventional themes as well as invented materials meant to bring these ancient kings and bards to life. Is it not far more economical to imagine a process whereby the poems, many of them very old, all of them self-conscious literary efforts to begin with, survived through a slow process of recording, editorial accretion, and explication? Moreover, the relation of poem to colophon must have been, in many cases, far more intimate than any linear development could account for. There may well have been cases where the text and the colophon are, in a special sense, mutually determining—that is, cases where the poetic situation at work in the poem fits and informs the colophon long before the latter was recorded. Again, there is no need to assume that the “fictive” nature of the colophon means it is false. Quite the contrary may be the case: poem and colophon, though certainly distinct, usually share a single mental template. Fiction often offers a much closer approximation to truth than what passes for fact can give us. It’s also possible that some of the colophons are arbitrary editorial interventions long after the period of composition—that is, that well-known, ancient names were recycled by creative editors. We need to keep an open, critical mind as we investigate these materials.

While the Reconstruction Era was fraught with corruption and arguably doomed by the lack of land reform, the sweeping economic and political developments in that period did appear, at least for a time, to have the potential to seriously undermine, if not completely eradicate, the racial caste system in the South. With the protection of federal troops, African Americans began to vote in large numbers and seize control, in some areas, of the local political apparatus. Literacy rates climbed, and educated blacks began to populate legislatures, open schools, and initiate successful businesses. In 1867, at the dawn of the Reconstruction Era, no black men held political office in the South, yet three years later, at least 15 percent of all Southern elected officials were black. This is particularly extraordinary in light of the fact that fifteen years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - the high water mark of the Civil Rights Movement - fewer than 8 percent of all Southern elected officials were black.

The state of Mississippi eventually moved from hiring convict labor to organizing its own convict labor camp, known as Parchman Farm. It was not alone. During the decade following Redemption, the convict population grew ten times faster than the general population: 'Prisoners became younger and blacker, and the length of their sentences soared.' It was the nation's first prison boom and, as they are today, the prisoners were disproportionately black. After a a brief period of progress during Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves, once again, virtually defenseless.

Larry Goodson, an American scholar of Afghanistan, interviewed Taliban leaders along the Pakistan border during this period and found that the movement benefited from “a perception that the Americans would leave, that reconstruction would not succeed, and that Afghanistan would return to chaos.

There are waves in history, as we have seen, including some vast tsunamis. But the idea that those waves are like waves of light and sound is an illusion. In the 1920s, the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff sought to show that there were such patterns in capitalism, inferring from British, French, and German economic statistics the existence of fifty-year cycles of expansion followed by depression.114 For this contribution, which continues to be influential with many investors today, Stalin had Kondratieff arrested, imprisoned, and later shot. Unfortunately, modern research dispels the idea of such regularity in economic life. The economic historian Paul Schmelzing’s meticulous reconstruction of interest rates back to the thirteenth century points instead to a long-run, “supra-secular” decline in nominal rates, driven mostly by the process of capital accumulation, punctuated periodically but randomly by inflationary episodes nearly always associated with wars.115 Yet

the war left a lasting trauma, and resulted in, not an apocalypse, but, on the one hand, a rather gross period of industrial and commercial development and, on the other, a severe disillusionment for the idealists who had been hoping for something better, these are matters about which we in the North have rarely thought and even less often spoken. We have, in general, accepted the epic that Lincoln directed and lived and wrote. Since it was brought to an end by his death the moment after the war was won, we are able to dissociate him entirely from the ignominies and errors of the Reconstruction and to believe he would have handled its problems better.

Stratton omitted, exaggerated, and fabricated information in order to deliver a title that was at once pious and titillating for his publisher, Whitton, Towne and Company, an arm of the Methodist Book Concern, which was trying to boost book sales in order to fund less lucrative church projects. His selective storytelling created a collage effect: there was what he knew and told, what he knew and did not tell, and what, perhaps, Olive never revealed, which cannot be reclaimed or reconstructed. Stratton even acknowledged the omissions in his conclusion: “Much of that dreadful period is unwritten, and will remain forever unwritten.

The reorganisation of the world has at first to be mainly the work of a "movement" or a Party or a religion or cult, whatever we choose to call it. We may call it New Liberalism or the New Radicalism or what not. It will not be a close-knit organisation, toeing the Party line and so forth. It may be a very loose-knit and many faceted, but if a sufficient number of minds throughout the world, irrespective of race, origin or economic and social habituations, can be brought to the free and candid recognition of the essentials of the human problem, then their effective collaboration in a conscious, explicit and open effort to reconstruct human society will ensue. And to begin with they will do all they can to spread and perfect this conception of a new world order, which they will regard as the only working frame for their activities, while at the same time they will set themselves to discover and associate with themselves, everyone, everywhere, who is intellectually able to grasp the same broad ideas and morally disposed to realise them. The distribution of this essential conception one may call propaganda, but in reality it is education. The opening phase of this new type of Revolution must involve therefore a campaign for re-invigorated and modernised education throughout the world, an education that will have the same ratio to the education of a couple of hundred years ago, as the electric lighting of a contemporary city has to the chandeliers and oil lamps of the same period. On its present mental levels humanity can do no better than what it is doing now. Vitalising education is only possible when it is under the influence of people who are themselves learning. It is inseparable from the modern idea of education that it should be knit up to incessant research. We say research rather than science. It is the better word because it is free from any suggestion of that finality which means dogmatism and death. All education tends to become stylistic and sterile unless it is kept in close touch with experimental verification and practical work, and consequently this new movement of revolutionary initiative, must at the same time be sustaining realistic political and social activities and working steadily for the collectivisation of governments and economic life. The intellectual movement will be only the initiatory and correlating part of the new revolutionary drive. These practical activities must be various. Everyone engaged in them must be thinking for himself and not waiting for orders. The only dictatorship he will recognise is the dictatorship of the plain understanding and the invincible fact. And if this culminating Revolution is to be accomplished, then the participation of every conceivable sort of human+being who has the mental grasp to see these broad realities of the world situation and the moral quality to do something about it, must be welcomed. Previous revolutionary thrusts have been vitiated by bad psychology. They have given great play to the gratification of the inferiority complexes that arise out of class disadvantages. It is no doubt very unjust that anyone should be better educated, healthier and less fearful of the world than anyone else, but that is no reason why the new Revolution should not make the fullest use of the health, education, vigour and courage of the fortunate. The Revolution we are contemplating will aim at abolishing the bitterness of frustration. But certainly it will do nothing to avenge it. Nothing whatever. Let the dead past punish its dead.

Kirkus Review: Carroll Engelhardt, By the Sweat of His Brow: The R. M. Probstfield Family at Oakport Farm (FriesenPress January 5, 2023) “Engelhardt recounts a German family’s experience living in Minnesota’s Red River Valley in the late 19th century. In 1832, Randolph Michael Probstfield was born near Koblenz in the Prussian-controlled Rhineland in western Germany, the son of devoutly Catholic parents who encouraged him to enter the priesthood and were bitterly disappointed when he did not (Probstfield observed, “If I had promised to be a priest and kept my word, today I would be . . . a feted-up, high-living hypocrite in the so-called vineyard of the Lord, and not a farmer . . . earning his bread by the sweat of his brow”). Like many other Germans before him in search of a better life, he emigrated to the United States in 1852, traveled extensively, and worked a dizzying array of jobs before he finally settled in Minnesota in 1860, a time when Germans were the state’s dominant immigrant group. In an effort to assimilate, he altered the spelling of his last name, which was originally Probstfeld. For the rest of his life he would maintain a delicate balance between his enthusiastic loyalty to the United States and pride in his German ancestry. Eventually, Probstfield’s indefatigable work ethic paid off, and he bought Oakport Farm in the Red River Valley in the 1868. He would eventually purchase thousands of acres of land and enjoy the prosperity that came with a great agricultural boom at the end of the 19th century, a period depicted with a scrupulous exactitude by the author. Engelhardt delivers much more than a family history—his book is a granular account of frontier life in America, a life of punishing toil that also held the promise of wealth and freedom. Probstfield emerges as a fascinating patriarch of his family (he married Catherine Goodman, with whom he had 13 children); a rugged, secular individualist, he held progressive political and cultural views, including a great attraction to socialism. He was exceedingly active in local political life, a contentious milieu diligently reconstructed by the author. His extraordinary rigor can be a bit overwhelming—there are minutely detailed discussions of Oakport’s small-grain production, Probstfield’s horticultural experiments, and various meat-preservation methods. However, for the reader looking for a finely detailed treatment of this period in American history, this is an edifying study. A magisterially researched work in American History.

SANDINISTAS. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional—FSLN), more commonly known as Sandinistas, ruled Nicaragua from 1979 until 1990, attempting to transform the country along Marxist-influenced lines. The group formed in the early 1960s, and spent the first two decades of its existence engaged in a guerrilla campaign against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, receiving backing from Cuba which remained a close ally when the Sandinistas took office. With popular revulsion towards Somoza rising, in 1978 the Sandinistas encouraged the Nicaraguan people to rise up against his regime. After a brief but bloody battle, in July 1979 the dictator was forced into exile, and the Sandinistas emerged victorious. With the country in a state of morass, they quickly convened a multi-interest five-person Junta of National Reconstruction to implement sweeping changes. The junta included rigid Marxist and long-serving Sandinista Daniel Ortega, and under his influence Somoza’s vast array of property and land was confiscated and brought under public ownership. Additionally, mining, banking and a limited number of private enterprises were nationalized, sugar distribution was taken into state hands, and vast areas of rural land were expropriated and distributed among the peasantry as collective farms. There was also a highly successful literacy campaign, and the creation of neighborhood groups to place regional governance in the hands of workers. Inevitably, these socialist undertakings got tangled up in the Cold War period United States, and in 1981 President Ronald Reagan began funding oppositional “Contra” groups which for the entire decade waged an economic and military guerrilla campaign against the Sandinista government. Despite this and in contrast to other communist states, the government fulfilled its commitment to political plurality, prompting the growth of opposition groups and parties banned under the previous administration. In keeping with this, an internationally recognized general election was held in 1984, returning Ortega as president and giving the Sandinistas 61 of 90 parliamentary seats. Yet, in the election of 1990, the now peaceful Contra’s National Opposition Union emerged victorious, and Ortega’s Sandinistas were relegated to the position of the second party in Nicaraguan politics, a status they retain today. The Marxism of the Sandinistas offered an alternative to the Marx- ism–Leninism of the Soviet Bloc and elsewhere. This emanated from the fact that the group attempted to blend a Christian perspective on theories of liberation with a fervent devotion to both democracy and the Marxian concepts of dialectical materialism, worker rule and proletariat-led revolution. The result was an arguably fairly success- ful form of socialism cut short by regional factors.

The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics...Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him." (The Nation, progressive periodical of our day, published demeaning, racist opinions of Black Americans during Reconstruction (ie pg. 854 softcover)

I have had the pleasure – and it really has been a pleasure – to cook in a large number of both real surviving period ovens and historic reconstructions. The reconstructions have been invaluable for highlighting the technical aspects of the originals that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

As decolonization took its agonizing course and other industrial powers reconstructed from wartime damage, the US share of global wealth (GDP) continued to decline, to about 25 percent by 1970—still phenomenal but not what it had been at the peak of US power. By now it’s declined further, but these measures are becoming misleading as we enter the period of neoliberal globalization in which national accounts mean much less than they did before. There’s a different measure of power that is becoming more significant: the percentage of ownership of the world’s wealth by US-based corporations. The answer is an absolutely astounding 50 percent. Today, the statistics are good. They reveal that 50 percent of the world’s wealth is in the hands of US-based corporations, even though the national account, GDP, is not anywhere near that.

The federal government had taken over the affairs of the South, during a period known as Reconstruction, and the newly freed men were able to exercise rights previously denied them. They could vote, marry, or go to school if there were one nearby, and the more ambitious among them could enroll in black colleges set up by northern philanthropists, open businesses, and run for office under the protection of northern troops.

The first proper sample-based census was not carried out until 1949, so demographers have to reconstruct population totals from micro-level data on food supply, settlement patterns, village counts, birth records, and the like. The most sophisticated modeling by French and Belgian demographers variously suggests a population of 8 to 11 million in 1885 and 10 to 12 million by 1908. The Belgian Jean-Paul Sanderson, using a backward projection method by age cohorts, found a slight decline, from 10.5 million in 1885 to 10 million in 1910. This estimated change in total population governed by changing birth and death rates over a 25 year period represents a negligible annual net decline in population.

In sum, to a large extent, the ultimate success of the reconstruction of Japan can be traced to the existing endowment of know-how and skills related to social relations, organizational forms, and production techniques that survived the war and carried through to the postwar period.

For the first seventy years, Muslims worshipped alongside Christians in the existing Byzantine basilica. According to historical reconstructions, Muslims prayed in the southeastern end of the complex, in a special space known as a masalla, outfitted with a mihrab that pointed the faithful toward Mecca. Meanwhile, Christians continued to conduct their liturgy at the western end of the church, around the existing altar and apse. Scholars believe that the blocked doorway mentioned above served as an entrance for both groups, with Christians turning left and Muslims right into their respective sections of the complex. This arrangement was not so unusual: we know about similar arrangements at other sites from the early Islamic period, where the first generation of Muslims prayed in spaces borrowed from their Christian subjects.

One of the great challenges in reconstructing a mass extinction is making sense of what happened when. In the same way we have divided living things into a hierarchy of divisions—domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species—geologists have broken apart the long history of our planet into eon, era, period, epoch, and age.

The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow.

On a different plane there were the less idealistic, less publicized aims of Northern policy during the war and the period following. These aims centered in the protection of a sectional economy and numerous privileged interests, and were reflected in new statutes regarding taxes, money, tariffs, banks, land, railroads, subsidies, all placed upon the law books while the South was out of the Union.

The period following the Civil War is called Reconstruction, and it lasted from 1867 to 1877.

Phelps and Hirst surveyed several hundred people about their September 11 recollections over a period of ten years, observing the subjects’ memories deteriorate even as the subjects exhibited no clue that their deeply felt stories were morphing. All the participants whom Phelps and Hirst surveyed had formed a flashbulb memory of the 9/11 attacks. It turned out that most of the forgetting, which was manifested in errors of either omission or commission, occurred in the first year after the event. The deviations ranged from simple tweaks to wholesale revisions, and even in the case of extreme changes, the subjects were unaware that they were deconstructing and reconstructing what seemed, to them, a very stable story. Researchers believe that the act of repeating a narrative somehow contaminates it, meaning that nowhere in our brains do any permanent, unmarred memories reside, no matter how much it may feel that way.

People in this country are still unaware of the fact that former slaves brought public education to the South. That white kids in the South would never have had the opportunity to get an education had not it been for the persistent campaigns for education. Because education was equivalent to liberation. No liberation without education. And then of course there was the economic development during that brief period. I’m talking about the period between 1865 and 1877, Radical Reconstruction. As a matter of fact, many progressive laws were passed when Black people were in the legislatures of various states, progressive laws with respect to women’s rights as well, not just with respect to issues of race.

crucial for the reconstruction of the chronology of what is called the Old Assyrian period,