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HIST 491: Reconstruction and Beyond: Race and the Struggle for Equality After Slavery (Spring 2025)

General Approach

  • Break your topic into key words.
  • Consider alternative terms.
  • Use boolean to construct searches.
  • Revise!
  • pay attention to citations and footnotes.

Examples

emancipation celebrations, specifically in Louisiana, and maybe just New Orleans. Also maybe expanding the idea of an "emancipation celebration" and, in that context, considering the New Orleans Massacre of 1866, a massacre that began as an attack on a parade of freedmen, many of whom served in the Civil War.

(Louisiana OR "new orleans") AND emancipation AND celebrat*

(Louisiana OR "new orleans") AND "emancipation proclamation" 

"new orleans" AND massacre AND 1866

The relationship between the KKK and the government during reconstruction (local, state, federal?)

klan AND ("state government" OR "local government" OR "federal government")

klan AND government AND reconstruction

Consider: use secondary sources to identify key figures, or states/towns where their influence was especially strong

The difference in medical treatment received by Black and white civil war veterans with visible disabilities during the war and after.  Also medical institutions and the treatment of Black patients, for example mental institutions and the institutionalization of Black people. Interested generally in disability

Arlington VA during the CW – part of Virginia not controlled by the Confederacy.

 

development of Black Richmond, especially Jackson Ward, during Reconstruction.

textbooks and/or historical fiction portrayals of Civil War and Reconstruction, and effects on children in middle school.

periodization in historiography of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age.

comparing how slavery came to an end during the Civil War and during the Haitian Revolution. 

How Lincoln’s image was co-opted by Lost Cause ideologues as part of “reconciliation” efforts after Reconstruction