As they contested the legitimacy of a white American nation-state, African Americans were already proposing an alternative identity for themselves and the institutions they were creating for their new nation. The church alone could not build a national community for African Americans: other institutions were needed. Black women reformers established a series of institutions, including industrial schools and other spaces of education, that were predicated on African Americans instructing their community by invoking race pride and representations of an authentic historical past, as they also worked to counteract white attempts to rewrite the South's defeat in the Civil War. For example, reformers—including Anna Julia Cooper and Pauline E. Hopkins and their circle of nationalistic intellectuals, some of them former slaves—worked under the banner of the Negro Society for Historical Research (founded in 1911) and published papers, books, and essays on topics related to “race-history.” Cooper and Hopkins sought to depict an “authentic folk memory before the hegemonizing power of the state … [could] … do its work.” Cooper described the role of women in developing new institutional models for the race. She writes,