Teaching American History With NYPL Digital Collections: Reconstruction

Reconstruction, which lasted from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 through the commencement of the Hayes presidency in 1877, is one of the most consequential yet misunderstood eras of American history—and one of the most challenging to teach. Luckily, the New York Public Library has a bevy of online-accessible resources, from digitized primary sources to e-books, to help teachers tackle the Reconstruction era. 

I've put together a curated group of documentary resources that can be tailored to many different levels and classrooms, from middle and high school social studies classes to undergraduate and graduate courses.

Individual documents from NYPL's Digital Collections provide excellent primary source material to excite the imaginations of students and facilitate document analysis. More advanced students can pursue independent research projects using our many e-resources, as well as digitized collections available via the Archives and Manuscripts portal. Along the way, I'll also share useful, tried-and-true teaching resources from other institutions. 

Reconstruction: The Basics

What exactly happened during Reconstruction? Well, a lot. For a little over a decade, Americans grappled with the traumatic aftermath of the Civil War and transformed the country's legal system to codify the political rights of former slaves. African Americans knitted together families torn apart by slavery and were elected to offices across the South. White southerners fought back, often violently, against the expansion of black rights. By the mid-1870s, many northern white politicians became more conservative and shifted their focus away from the South. When Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was elected in 1876, he refused to use the federal government to enforce black political rights in the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. 

Teachers who need a primer on the period should look no further than Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction, which is, as the title indicates, a truncated version of his seminal (and very long) Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. Both are available as e-books. The shorter version can also serve as a good text for undergraduate courses.  

Two rich resources for teaching about Reconstruction are "The Reconstruction Era," a unit from Facing History and Ourselves, and "Teach Reconstruction," from the Zinn Education Project. Both offer suggested readings, exercises, and other materials for instructors of many different levels and types of classes. 

Teaching Topic: Myths of Reconstruction

To understand why Reconstruction has had such a contested history, students must learn about the basics of historiography: the study of the different ways that historians, over time, have interpreted moments in history. In the decades that followed the Reconstruction era, amidst the segregation of Jim Crow and the everyday racism that imbued American politics and culture, a group of historians, often dubbed "the Dunning School," argued that Reconstruction was a tragic mistake. Dunning School historians framed Reconstruction as a period rife with corruption and littered with evidence of the political incapacity of black Americans. These scholars, according to historian Eric Foner, "provided an intellectual foundation for the system of segregation and black disfranchisement that followed." Though discredited by historians in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, some of the ideas of the Dunning School still linger on in many Americans' understanding of Reconstruction.

To introduce students to the historiography for Reconstruction, and how current scholars are better interpreting the period, assign this short video from Facing History and Ourselves. 

Teachers can then craft a document analysis exercise using digital resources from NYPL by asking students to read excerpts from a history of Reconstruction written by a Dunning School scholar. NYPL's Digital Collections include excerpts from Walter L. Fleming's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (1905), one of the most stridently pro-southern and anti-black of the Dunning School histories. 

On the Digital Collections document page, scroll down to "Collection" and choose "View as Book." The selections include a number of visuals, charts, and illustrations included in Fleming's monograph. Instructors can choose to focus their document analysis questions on individual pages, or assess the visuals as a group.

For a secondary source pairing, The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction, available as an e-book with a valid NYPL library card, can provide essential context for teachers or students. Chapter Five, written by Michael W. Fitzgerald, focuses specifically on Fleming.

Teachers can also pair the Fleming analysis with an excerpt from W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois, a sociologist and activist, published his study the same year as Fleming's, blending rigorous research with a strident rebuttal of the Dunning School. Use your library card to access the e-book and read the final chapter, "The Propaganda of History."

As a follow-up assignment, teachers may ask students to locate a review of Fleming's and Du Bois' books using American Periodicals, a resource offering access to many serial publications between 1740 and 1950. 

Instructors in more advanced courses may be looking for remote ways to introduce students to independent archival research. NYPL has digitized a number of archival collections, which can be explored on the Library's Archives and Manuscripts Portal. 

The Shivery family papers, an archival collection held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, offers an opportunity to teach students to navigate an archival collection remotely. The collection of correspondence, legal documents, and educational and professional papers chronicles generations of three southern African-American families: the Shiverys, Smiths, and Blazes.

On the collection page, look for this symbol, which indicates that a collection is partially or completely digitized. Click on the document image under “Digital Assets” and begin to explore this fully-digitized collection.

If you prefer, the document can also be accessed via Digital Collections.

Ask students to select a document or set of documents from the 615 digitized items in the Shivery family papers and write about them. Or, those instructors looking to create a more focused exercise can point students to a preselected set of documents. Images 407 through 418, for example, document a handwritten essay about Reconstruction in South Carolina written by student Lula Smith in 1940.

Ask students to work together to read the essay, and then analyze and discuss the different scholarly influences reflected in Lula Smith's work. How might they craft their own historiography essay on Reconstruction?

Other Teaching Ideas

NYPL’s Digital Collections include many more documents for those looking for primary sources documents about specific aspects of the Reconstruction era. Instructors can browse by item, and then search for “Reconstruction” under the Topics heading on the vertical navigation bar. 

For instructors looking for documents about black political leaders during Reconstruction, take a look at this chart of Republican participants in the 1876 state constitutional convention, an image in NYPL's Digital Collections. (Note: this chart is one of the images from Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, the abovementioned Dunning School book; the author marked the word convention in quotation marks).

Instructors can ask students to select a name and to use NYPL e-resources to conduct additional research—including the African American Historical Serials Collection, African American Newspapers (Readex), and African American Periodicals (Readex). 

For historians of gender, Reconstruction was a time in which politicians and African American communities remade the legal and social meanings of marriage. Instructors can ask students to read these 1865 Marriage Rules issued by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned lands. They can pair analysis of that primary source book with a reading from Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation, available as an e-book with an NYPL library card. Chapter 5 is entitled “Wage Labor and Marriage Bonds.” 

We’d love to hear what documents worked for you in your classroom! Instructors and teachers can comment on this post with other ideas and questions.

More Teaching American History with NYPL Digital Collections:

• Childhood in America
• The American Revolution