Southern Reconstruction

Confronting the establishment narrative about any historical topic can be a perilous endeavor. There are several that present such large minefields that most historians dare not attempt to cross, among them the “Civil War,” Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights movement. Bucking the accepted version of events in any of those fields is a death knell for the professional historian. Fortunately, those rules don’t apply to the “amateur” class, and Philip Leigh has proven to be one of the more promising and objective of that group. His recent tome, Southern Reconstruction, offers the best summary of the political, economic, and social dynamics of Reconstruction since William A. Dunning’s masterful turn of the century study, a work that for political reasons has been castigated by the historical establishment but never entirely refuted.