Defining Moments

by CLARK, KATHLEEN ANN

• ISBN13: 9780807829578
• ISBN10: 0807829579
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

The historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction has earned increasing attention from scholars. Only recently, however, have historians begun to explore African American efforts to interpret those events. With "Defining Moments, Kathleen Clark shines new light on African American commemorative traditions in the South, where events such as Emancipation Day and Fourth of July ceremonies served as opportunities for African Americans to assert their own understandings of slavery, the Civil War, and Emancipation--efforts that were vital to the struggles to define, assert, and defend African American freedom and citizenship. Focusing on urban celebrations that drew crowds from surrounding rural areas, Clark finds that commemorations served as critical forums for African Americans to define themselves collectively. As they struggled to assert their freedom and citizenship, African Americans wrestled with issues such as the content and meaning of black history, class-inflected ideas of respectability and progress, and gendered notions of citizenship. Clark's examination of the people and events that shaped complex struggles over public self-representation in African American communities brings new understanding of southern black political culture in the decades following Emancipation and provides a more complete picture of historical memory in the South.

Author Biography

Kathleen Ann Clark is assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
INTRODUCTION: Language that Cannot Be Misunderstood
African American Commemoration, 1863-1913	1	(12)
CHAPTER ONE The Vanguard of Liberty Must Look into the Past
Celebrations of Freedom	13	(43)
CHAPTER TWO A Resurrection of Manhood
Gendered Reconstruction	56	(39)
CHAPTER THREE Has Emancipation Been a Failure?
The End of Reconstruction	95	(38)
CHAPTER FOUR Signs of the Times
Making Progress in the Post-Reconstruction South	133	(55)
CHAPTER FIVE Bosoms Filled with Hope
Collective Representation in the Age of Jim Crow	188	(41)
Notes	229	(42)
Bibliography	271	(24)
Index	295