Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s

by Ward M. McAfee

Overview

Religion, Race, and Reconstruction simultaneously resurrects a lost dimension of a most important segment of American history and illuminates America's present and future by showing the role religious issues played in Reconstruction during the 1870s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791438480
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	07/10/1998
Series:	SUNY series, Religion and American Public Life
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ward M. McAfee is Professor of History at California State University, San Bernardino. He has written several books, including A History of the World's Great Religions.

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Prologue to the Seventies

2. Church, State, and School

3. Dividing the School Funds

4. Educating the Freedmen

5. Federal Aid to Education

6. Reconstruction's Racial Dissolution

7. Backlash: 1874

8. The Anti-Catholic Antidote

9. The End of Reconstruction

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"This nineteenth-century study is highly instructive about a cluster of today's issues: the role of religion and religious beliefs in public education; interactions between religion and national self-understanding; connections between implicit racism and political success; the fairness of school vouchers; and tensions between multiculturalism and the common American culture. McAfee goes to the heart of these and other complex historical debates and lifts out their subtle but significant meanings." — William D. Dean, Iliff School of Theology, author of American Religious Empiricism

"This is a masterfully written book with virtually flawless research, synthesis, and argumentation. It presents a fresh, iconoclastic interpretation of Reconstruction, Republicanism, and the place of educational reform in the 1870s that leaves most of us flat-footed. McAfee sees connections among issues, movements, and people that all of us laboring in this field have overlooked. Best of all, this is an interpretation that works. The author is thorough, modest, but always persuasive. I began reading the book skeptical of the claims the author promotes; by the end, I was fully convinced of nearly all of them." — Ronald E. Butchart, coeditor of Classroom Discipline in American Schools: Problems and Possibilities for Democratic Education

From the Publisher

Tells the story of the Republicans' public school crusade of the 1870s. McAfee (history, CalState U. in San Bernardino) looks at how the movement grappled with issues of race and religion and also with the very structure of the American polity. Along the way he discusses issues such as spiritual concerns, child-rearing, practices, public responsibility, the maintenance of common moral standards, and whether or not the US is a Christian nation. Although intended primarily to elucidate the meaning of American political culture in the 1870s, the work also gives historical perspective to issues that continue to interest the national community. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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