White rage by carol6/24/2023 The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, offer powerful guarantees of freedom, voting rights, and equal protection from discrimination under the law. Instead of focusing on Lincoln, the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation, Anderson focuses on Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, and the enormous compromises he made, supposedly to keep the newly re-formed Union together. The book begins with the Reconstruction Era. has been resisted, compromised, and clawed back by white rage. The stories that Anderson highlights are not necessarily the most familiar or headline-grabbing ones, but this approach suits her argument about the missed opportunities and roads not taken by American society: that every step towards racial equality in the U.S. She draws on both national sources and local ones, from Supreme Court decisions to regional newspapers and city by-laws. Instead of retelling the familiar stories of these flashpoints in American history, Anderson looks into the white backlash against these marks of progress, and the way aggrieved whites have tried, and continue to try, to stop the arc of history from bending towards justice. Anderson’s historiography is both unusual and rigorous and has a somewhat contrarian approach.
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