Classics and the Reconstruction, with Jackie Murray

Abstract

Throughout the Reconstruction era, from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 to the start of the Jim Crow era at the end of the nineteenth century, both Black activists and white supremacists used their classical education in service of their political ideals. Shivaike Shah talks to Jackie Murray, professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky, about the ways that writers engaged in dialogue with one another about the merits of Reconstruction, the status of classical education at this time, and the assumptions that such an education produced in its pupils about the inherent value of empire - irrespective of which side of the debate they were on.

Bibliography

Paywalled

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (HarperCollins, 2014)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin, 2019)

Jackie Murray, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Quest of the Silver Fleece: The Education of Black Medea’, TAPA 149.2 (2019), 141-160

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.