Reading #1: Blight, Chapter 2, “Regeneration and Reconstruction,”

Questions: The battle over Reconstruction was a battle over whose definition of regeneration would prevail, according to David Blight. What were the competing ideas and what led to their successes or failures?

Patricia Hills, “Cultural Racism: Resistance and Accommodation in the Civil War Art of Eastman Johnson and Thomas Nast,” in Patricia Johnston, ed. Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley, 2006), pp. 103-123.

Question: How does the art of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods reflect/parallel the political discourse of reconciliation?