QUESTIONS

Questions On American History

Questions On American History

We study history to avoid the mistakes of the past. In the period, studied so far, what are the two worst mistakes we ought to avoid, and have we done so? Why or why not do you think?

One mistake was the Compromise of 1877 meant that the old elite mainly white South, deprived of various civil rights after the Civil War for his support of the Confederation, to recover to the fullest in the state governments, and the Democratic Party achieved a broad base widespread support among voters of white South, giving rise to the "Solid South" in force until the mid- twentieth century (Gordon, 2003). The Republican and Loyalist supporters retained its strength only in some less developed regions of Tennessee and Kentucky, traditionally hostile to the landowners in Virginia or Georgia. The negative consequence was that the population of blacks newly liberated from slavery since 1863, lost the protection of the authorities designated by the federal government, and practically deserted before the new Democratic leaders, who had been supporters of the defeated Confederate States America but now the GOP managed to reinstate them to their old political influence in the South. In fact, this new situation strengthened the white segregationists to establish the laws of Jim Crow and keep alive the racial discrimination to the descendants of slaves, marginalizing their most basic rights of citizens for almost eighty years. For this purpose, invoked the doctrine of "separate but equal" freedom and recognized the citizenship of the black population, but their basic rights severely restricted in practice (Gordon, 2003).

Furthermore, reconstruction was the period after the American Civil War when the southern states, which had joined the defeat of Confederation, reintegrated into the Union. The Unionist devastating invasion of the south, attacks on civilian targets, destroying infrastructure, followed by the economic policy implemented in the territory of the vanquished after the war, caused the rise of a bitter resentment of many Southerners against the federal government. Abraham Lincoln presented a plan of reconstruction, but the immense human cost of war and social changes made ??it brought the United States Congress to take back again the secessionists not imposed preconditions, such as guarantees of the freedomom of free blacks (Henretta, James, 2007). They were still passing laws to restore the states of the South: Civil Rights Act (1866), Reconstruction Acts and Constitutional Amendments. The end of Reconstruction marked the end of the brief period of freedom and civil rights for African Americans in the south, where most of them lived. The company created a segregated South, through the “Jim Crow laws", which members of the elite Southern white (called "Redeemers" or "Bourbon Democrats") evidently took control, through an almost one-party system, focusing on the influence dominance exerted by the Democratic Party on local politics, a system that will be called “The Solid South". Moreover, the crowds and sometimes even the white authorities in the south began to practice the lynching as a mechanism of terror, in ...