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Thirty years after the publication of John Hope Franklin’s influential interpretative essay Reconstruction: After the Civil War, ten distinguished scholars have contributed to a new appraisal of Reconstruction scholarship. Recognizing Professor Franklin’s major contributions to the study of the Reconstruction era, their work of analysis and review has been dedicated to him. Although most of the contributors studied with John Hope Franklin, The Facts of Reconstruction is not a festschrift, at least not the conventional sense. The book does not offer a comprehensive assessment of Franklin’s remarkably wide-ranging work in southern and Afro-American history, but instead engages his influential interpretation of Reconstruction. The essays in The Facts of Reconstruction focus upon questions raised in Reconstruction: After the Civil War. Was southern white intransigence the decisive influence in Presidential Reconstruction? What as the role of violence in southern “redemption”? How successful were the educational experiments of the Reconstruction era? Why did southern Republicans fail to build an effective coalition capable of surviving the pressure of racism? In addition, several essays discuss questions not directly addressed in Franklin’s book, since his pathbreaking work indirectly stimulated study in a variety of new areas. For example, contributors to The Facts of Reconstruction examine the ante-bellum origins of Reconstruction, evaluate the development of racial segregation during the late nineteenth century, analyze the political and legal ideas behind the Reconstruction debates, and study the prospering minority among blacks. Representing a variety of perspectives, the authors have sought to follow John Hope Franklin’s admonition that Reconstruction should not be used as “a mirror of ourselves.” If they have succeeded, this book in honor of a profound scholar and inspiring teacher will provoke new discussion about “the facts of Reconstruction.”
Eric Anderson is professor of history at Pacific Union College. He is the author of Race and Politics in North Carolina 1872-1901: The Black Second and a contributor to Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era and Race, Class, and Politics in Southern History: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Durden. Alfred A. Moss, Jr., associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, is the author of The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth and coauthor of the sixth edition of From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. He is also an Episcopal clergyman. The son of a lawyer and a teacher, John Hope Franklin was born on January 2, 1915, in the small, all-black village of Rentiesville, Oklahoma. After studying in the public schools of Rentiesville and Tulsa, he enrolled at Fisk University in 1931, intending to prepare himself for a career in law. But under the influence of a stimulating history professor, Theodore S. Currier, he changed to a history of major. With Currier’s strong encouragement, Franklin pursued graduate work at Harvard University, earning a doctorate in 1941. Throughout his academic career John Hope Franklin has made his first priority the study and teaching of history. From the beginning, he insists, “I had no difficulty in saying to anyone who raised the matter that I was not interested in deanships, university presidencies, or ambassadorships.” He has taught generations of students at Fisk, St. Augustine’s College, North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central), Howard University, and Brooklyn College. After eighteen years at the University of Chicago (where he was honored at the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Professor) he “retired” to Duke University for three more years of teaching in the history department. In 1985 he allegedly retired again, only to begin a new career teaching American legal history in the Duke University Law School. A prolific scholar, Franklin has written or edited more than twenty books, including From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans; The Militant South, 1800–1860; Reconstruction: After the Civil War; A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North; George Washington Williams: A Biography; and Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938–1988. He has received numerous professional honors, including election as president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and Phi Beta Kappa. Franklin lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his college sweetheart, the former Aurelia Whittington. They have one son, John Whittington Franklin. John Hope, as his friends call him, remains an active lecturer and researcher, and is currently working on a book about fugitive slaves, as well as a biography of his father, Buck Franklin. An avid cultivator of orchids, John Hope Franklin relishes the fact that a variety of orchid is named in his honor.
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