The Capitol Dome

The Capitol Dome 56.1

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46 THE CAPITOL DOME The afternoon session began with an exploration of the ways veteran James Hope's Civil War- related art shifted after an Antietam battlefield reunion in 1888; James J. Broomall (Shepherd University) identified some of Hope's sources and argued that his "grisly" artwork portrayed the bat- tlefield differently than contemporaneous popular prints. Next, John David Smith (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) discussed several postwar proposals for and strategies to approve reparations for formerly enslaved people. Finally, Heather Cox Richardson (Boston Col- lege) traced the way opponents of civil rights for Afri- can-Americans claimed that they were actually opposed to a kind of socialism and redistribution of wealth—lan- guage that echoes through the twentieth century to the present. The Friday, May 3 session met in the Russell Sen- ate Office Building's Kennedy Caucus Room. The first two speakers presented a panel on the Supreme Court and Reconstruction. Paul Finkelman (Gratz College and symposium director) argued that changes in more immediate postwar laws, especially those that dealt with segregation, the black vote, and black officeholders, rep- resented a "revolution in law" that the Supreme Court rolled back because it was ill-equipped to understand both the revolution and the lives of actual black peo- ple. Randall Kennedy (Harvard Law School) detailed the 1875 Civil Rights Act and the Supreme Court's 1883 decisions that invalidated the "public accommodations" portion of it—which allowed individuals to discriminate against other individuals and remains the case law today (twentieth-century civil rights challenges relied on the commerce clause to challenge segregation). He concluded with a challenge for the audience to do more than learn about these types of decisions, to be aware and critical of our current law and the way it exists under a pall from the destruction of Reconstruction. Orville Vernon Burton (Clemson University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law) opened the last segment of the symposium with a very personal presentation about his experiences as an expert witness in voting rights cases; his role as a his- torian helped minority plaintiffs meet their burden to establish intent, for instance. Brook Thomas (University of California at Irvine) provided the last presentation of the day; he explored three different twentieth-century portrayals of Andrew Johnson's impeachment and argued that their common reliance on a 1903 history led to a dubious narrative—still alive today—that Johnson's impeachment was f lawed because it was a partisan, political process. You can find more information about each of these talks by searching #reconstructionhistory or #history- talk on Twitter. The Friday talks appeared on C-SPAN and are available on C-SPAN's website; search the speak- er's name and "capitol historical society." And in the long run, most of these talks will appear in a volume from Ohio University Press collecting the symposium pro- ceedings in 2020 or so. To learn more about upcoming USCHS history events, visit uschs.org and check the news releases or cal- endar events for the latest updates. An audience member asks a question during the concluding Q&A session on May 2. Judith Geisberg Spring Symposium (continued fom the back cover)

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