Reconstruction And The Myth Of The Lost Cause Analysis
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Reconstruction Of America Reconstruction and the Myth of the lost cause has been misinterpreted and in some cases not even taught by most teachers. The reconstruction failures has affected race relations throughout the United States. According to Jennifer Schuessler from the article Taking Another Look At the Reconstruction Era, she defines reconstruction as the period of time from the year 1865 through 1877. Reconstruction is when most federal troops were taken from the South and white Democrats took control of the state governments. Eric Foner wrote the article Why Reconstruction Matters he explains that during reconstruction the nation’s laws and Constitution were changed to give basic rights to former slaves. According to the article…show more content… The term the lost cause refers to confederacy which is the confederate states of America. He fights over this every year because there are some teachers who try to glorify American history and sweep the bad things that the United States has been swept under the rug. Locally, there even is a teacher in U-46 who refuses to teach some of the curriculum because it shows the bad things that America has done. This is a bad thing because all students are not being taught the same thing and some teachers are skipping over topics. He feels like reconstruction needs to be taught about in every history class because it is a very important event that happened in American history. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was also created ion result of the Reconstruction to help any person who was born in the United States citizenship (Foner). It is important for people to know the importance acts, and laws that were put into place from the reconstruction. The 14th amendment was also created to give equal citizenship to everyone too (Schuessler). The Civil Rights Act of 1866 ended the Jim Crow laws that were in place, and the Jim Crow laws allowed segregation to happen between white and black people…show more content… These statues are not only a part of our history, but also a landmark for people to see and learn about our country’s past. The reconstruction and the monuments were both interpetured in the wrong way. A quote from the article We Need to Move, Not Destroy, Confederate Monuments, it says that “when you find yourself at a crime scene, you don’t destroy the evidence. You preserve it for it for the prosecution. In the case of images like this, the prosecutor is history, and the trial may be a long one, stretching far into the future, with many witnesses called.” Eric Foner even mentions in his article that “But the era has long been misunderstood.” Both the monuments and reconstruction need to be looked at in a different way than what they are right now. Jennifer Schiessler also stated in her article that “In recent decades, historians, most notably, Eric Foner, have discredited such stereotypes, painting a more inspiring picture of a hopeful if different era. But that work has been slow to seep into the consciousness.” This shows that people are not learning the truth about reconstruction just like they are judging those sculptures the wrong way. William R. Black also states in his article that some former presidents had slaves, and people want their monuments to be taken down. However, the monuments were made to praise the good that those presidents have