In May 1997, a group of distinguished historians announced the formation of the Historical Society, an organization that sought to be free of the jargon-laden debates and political agendas that have come to characterize the profession. Eugene Genovese, Prsident of the Society, explained the commitment to form a new and genuinely diverse organization. "The Society extends from left to right and embraces people of every ideological and political tendency. The Society promotes frank debate in an atmosphere of civility, mutual respect, and common courtesy. All we require is that participants lay down plausible premises; reason logically; appeal to evidence; and prepare to exchange criticism with those who hold different points of view. Our goal: to promote an integrated history accessible to the public." From those beginnings, the Society has grown to include hundreds of members from every level of the profession, from Pulitzer-prize winning scholars to graduate students, across the ideological and political spectrum. In this first book from the Historical Society, several founding members explore central topics within the field; the enduring value of the practice of history; the sensitive use of historical records, sources, and archives; the value of common standards; and much more. An engaging and challenging work that will appeal to scholars, students, educators, and the many public readers who have become lost in the culture wars, Reconstructing History is sure to generate the kind of civil, reasoned debate that is a foundational goal of the Historical Society. Contributors include Walter A. McDougall, Marc Trachtenberg, Alan Charles Kors, Deborah A. Symonds, Leo P. Ribuffo, Bruce Kuklick, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Edward Berkowitz, John Patrick Diggins, John Womack, Victor Davis Hanson, Miriam R. Levin, Martin J. Sklar, Eugene D. Genovese, Daniel C. Littlefield, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Russell Jacoby, Rochelle Gurstein, Paul Rahe, Donald Kagan, Diane Ravitch, Sean Wilentz, Louis Ferleger and Richard H. Steckel.

Looks at the contest to construct history, focusing on competing versions of Reconstruction history supported by different factions after the Civil War. The author analyzes how the ultimately dominant version of the history won credence and how that in

A group of contributors highlight advances made in paleopathology and demography through the analyses of historic cemeteries. These advancements include associations of documentary evidence with skeletal evaluations, insights into history gained through the use of skeletal analyses when no documentation exists and applications of new evaluative techniques. Provides a glimpse into the problems faced by researchers embarking on the excavation and/or analysis of historic human remains.

"A picture book biography of John Roy Lynch, one of the first African-Americans elected into the United States Congress"--Provided by publisher.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Reconstructing History and Gender: Alice Walker is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Chronicles the history of the United States from the end of the Civil War through the difficult years of the Reconstruction.

Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.