Chapter 4 focuses on the importance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Using Albion Tourgée’s 1883 novel Bricks without Straw, Oliver Otis Howard’s account of his time as director of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and archival records of the Bureau itself, the novel is read as a fictional reenactment of the work of Reconstruction. Bricks without Straw features two male protagonists, one Black, one white. The emancipated Nimbus lives in Red Wing, a self-sustaining Black-owned Southern community. Hesden Le Moyne, the scion of the leading family in town, is a Union sympathizer but is pressured to join the Confederate Army and loses his left arm in battle. Hesden returns from the war both a pacifist and an abolitionist. In the novel, amputation forces readers to focus on the present and move beyond the past, in recognition that the past of the intact body is irrecoverable. The past of a South organized around the enslavement and exploitation of Black Americans is buried, like Hesden’s lost arm, discarded in favor of a future that puts Black self-determination at its core. Moreover, Black and white characters work together to create a postwar nation organized around racial equality and justice.

This brief essay addresses this volume’s multiple audiences – including undergraduate and graduate students; instructors who want to incorporate a new unit on Reconstruction into a colonial and US literature survey course or to teach a class on the subject; and scholars of American literature who might or might not work in the second half of the nineteenth century – who would benefit from a basic map to the significant changes now in progress in Reconstruction studies and strategies for teaching them. Within the past decade in particular, renewed and transformative interest in Reconstruction has moved to the forefront of the fields of US history and nineteenth-century US literary history. While the Reconstruction period has long been a staple in the field of US history (however troubled that narrative might have been, a topic to which I will turn shortly), that has notably not been the case in the field of literary studies. As Gordon Hutner points out in his introduction to the 2018 special issue of the flagship field journal American Literary History entitled “Reenvisioning Reconstruction,” Reconstruction has been “among the subjects least touched” by scholars otherwise energetically focused on revising field assumptions and canons. Scholarship to remedy this stark neglect and debates about how to do so have recently risen to the top of the disciplinary agenda. As Hutner puts it, “A nucleus of scholars has been revisiting the period and committing a great deal of industry and intelligence toward uncovering its critical exigencies in ways that previous generations of Americanists had missed.”1