This is a course investigating the cultural texts (literature, popular culture, and films) of and about American "reconstruction." Reconstruction refers to the historical period of national reunification (roughly 1863-1877) necessitated by the Civil War, but for our purposes it also stands for the much longer process of social, economic, and cultural changes that continue to affect the United States. Those changes were both progressive and regressive: Reconstruction saw the most liberal Civil Rights legislation in American history, even as it witnessed some of the most reactionary acts of repression. Vast wealth was produced and equally vast political corruption was unleashed. If the North won the Civil War, then the South won the ideological battle of Reconstruction. This course, therefore, will consider American Reconstruction as both a (literary) historical period and as a trope for long-term social transformation. These transformations include not only the production of new forms of racial identity (seen in Plessy v. Ferguson) but also new conditions of masculinity and femininity, new conceptions of national identity (read through the production of “regionalism”), and new technologies of observation. American writers participated in Reconstruction by trying to retell the story of America through the racial and social conflicts of the time. What is interesting to me, and what is central to this course, is that Reconstruction was also one of the favorite subjects of an emerging American film industry. Two of the most famous and important movies ever made--Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind--take Reconstruction as their subjects. Hollywood, like the earlier writers, attempted to create an American identity for itself by returning to what Kaja Silverman calls a site of "historical trauma." However, in its attempts to heal the national and social divisions, Hollywood found itself more often than not creating a nostalgia for a time before those divisions. This course will explore that nostalgia and those (continuing) divisions. Texts will include novels (e.g. Lydia Maria Child, Romance of the Republic, Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, Toni Morrison, Beloved, etc.) paired with theoretical texts.