It’s Black Historical past Month once more. And this February is our quadrennial Tremendous Black Historical past Month, the place we get a complete further soar day to squeeze in some bonus Black historical past. That’s more or less 4 % extra Black historical past than same old, greater than sufficient time for one sitting of the 1998 NBC miniseries The Temptations. Or, in case you’ve noticed sufficient of Otis, most likely you may spend the time studying a few of The Atlantic’s archive.

Over the last few years, we at The Atlantic had been running to believe and recontextualize the mag’s protection of Black other folks—each the puts the place the mag were given it proper and the place it didn’t. Frankly, the file has incessantly been blended, and the archive is thinner in lots of puts than may well be anticipated. However one notable second in Black historical past that captured The Atlantic’s creativeness was once the Reconstruction technology, the put up–Civil Battle duration during which Black freedpeople and their allies sought to create a in point of fact loose nation.

The Atlantic was once based as an abolitionist mag, and a few of our earliest works by way of Black authors involved the enormous job of Reconstruction. In those pages, the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass referred to as for a complete restructuring of society and demanded the poll for Black males. In 1864, Charlotte Forten Grimké chronicled her paintings on St. Helena Island, in South Carolina, aiding freedpeople and criticizing “those that, North in addition to South, taunt the coloured race with inferiority whilst they themselves use each method of their energy to weigh down and degrade them.”

For our December 2023 factor, “To Reconstruct the Country,” we would have liked to honor works reminiscent of those and in addition interpret the that means of the Reconstruction technology as of late, when lots of the nation’s greatest felony and political battles are focused at the Fourteenth Modification, followed in 1868 because the central Reconstruction modification. We additionally sought after to inspect the cases when The Atlantic fell brief, together with a sequence of 1901 articles during which distinguished historians reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson lamented Reconstruction as a mistake. In the long run, this mag factor regarded as the Reconstruction technology now not as a far off, bygone time however as residing historical past. The fullness of that residing historical past provides a thorough sense of risk anchored by way of the desires of Black freedpeople themselves. Shall we use a bit of of that sense of risk as of late.

Your Studying Listing

This Ghost of Slavery

By way of Anna Deavere Smith

Why Is The usa Terrified of Black Historical past?

By way of Lonnie G. Bunch III

Freedmen’s The city

By way of Dara T. Mathis

The Accomplice Common Whom The entire Different Confederates Hated

By way of Eric Foner

How Reconstruction Created American Public Schooling

By way of Adam Harris