Cumming and Giles, Meet Jenkins and Shaw: Voting Rights and Education in the Two Reconstructions

Historical explanations are inherently comparative. That is, they involve either an explicit or an implicit comparison with a particular or idealized condition or train of events. The phrase “Second Reconstruction” is based, of course, on a recognition of this logic of explanation, and the natural comparison is with the First Reconstruction, that beginning in the 1860s. Perhaps because lately so many historians seem to have lost faith in the possibility of generalization or even explanation, there have been almost no efforts to make rigorous comparisons between the First and Second American Reconstructions by those whose discipline would naturally lend itself to the comparative analysis of change over time. I offer a tentative comparison focusing on two issues: voting rights and racial discrimination in schools