The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today by Stephen Cushman (review)

Thomas and Sharon Kennedy-Nolle, as well as a forthcoming collection examining the writing of Albion W. Tourgée (edited by Sandra Gustafson and Robert Levine), show that though Reconstruction-era authors turned to imaginative works as their weapons, they were no less invested in discerning how to get the reading public to accept as true information about conditions in the South. In a moving epilogue, Blair extends his exploration into the latter decades of the nineteenth century with an exploration of Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching activism. Like the Freedmen’s Bureau reporting, the work of Wells and other African American activists drew on data collection techniques to center the perspectives of Black citizens and influence policy; however, as Blair points out, in contrast to the efforts of the 1860s, “the anti-lynching campaign lacked the backing of the federal government” (135). Further, the supposedly empirically motivated scholarship on Reconstruction that was emerging in the same late nineteenth-century period repeated the erasure of African American perspectives and dismissed the data collected by the Freedmen’s Bureau just as partisans of the early Reconstruction years did. In beautifully written closing paragraphs, Blair shows how present-day organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative redress these abiding distortions via the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a lynching monument. “It is significant to have a record of wrongdoing,” Blair concludes, because such a record leaves “the possibility of an accounting” (139). As the 2022 Zinn Education Project National Report on the Teaching of Reconstruction discloses, attending to the records of Reconstruction and accounting for their impact is necessary—and very much unfinished—work. The Record of Murders and Outrages contributes to that effort powerfully and should find a ready place on course syllabi as well as on the bookshelves of scholars and any reader interested in Reconstruction. Gregory Laski US Air Force Academy