After the events of the Civil War, an American ideology of Western innocence developed, one that has persisted throughout Modern America and in doing so has veiled the many offenses perpetrated by Americans. Using this reasoning, many atrocities and wrongdoings committed by people of the United States were justified through lens of victims; Patricia Limerick, a historian and author, labels this outlook as the “Empire of Innocence” in her chapter of the same title. She goes on in her book, proposing that “Innocence of intention placed the course of events in a bright and positive light”, an idea that can be found in the relations between United States’ citizens and Native Americans and freedmen following the end of the Civil War. In using this
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After the Civil War ended and African Americans received the rights to marry and participate in contracts, white supremacists in the South began to resist these changes in a period known as the “White Redemption”. During this time, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) began to increase in size and gain influence and power in the Southern United States. The 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, portrays the formation of the group as a response to the murder of a young white woman by a black man. Using their fear of freed black men raping vulnerable white women, the KKK initiated lynchings and garnered support for anti-black …show more content…
As the conflicts of the past exist today in the form of Confederate monuments for Black Americans, indigenous people continue to be the victims of these long ago actions, with Native Americans still confined to small parcels of land returned to them by the federal government. In both instances, Westerners cited their fear of violence as reason to commit wrongdoings, even though their true intentions are clear. On both occasions, the federal government attempted to reform legislature to accommodate these peoples; the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments were passed in the South, granting blacks equality and the right to vote, and the Treaty of Fort Laramie in the West, reserved the Black Hills for the sole use by the Lakota Sioux. Lastly, the United States government used land management as a tool to control both peoples, sharecropping used in the South and the Dawes Act in the
After the Civil War ended and African Americans received the rights to marry and participate in contracts, white supremacists in the South began to resist these changes in a period known as the “White Redemption”. During this time, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) began to increase in size and gain influence and power in the Southern United States. The 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, portrays the formation of the group as a response to the murder of a young white woman by a black man. Using their fear of freed black men raping vulnerable white women, the KKK initiated lynchings and garnered support for anti-black …show more content…
As the conflicts of the past exist today in the form of Confederate monuments for Black Americans, indigenous people continue to be the victims of these long ago actions, with Native Americans still confined to small parcels of land returned to them by the federal government. In both instances, Westerners cited their fear of violence as reason to commit wrongdoings, even though their true intentions are clear. On both occasions, the federal government attempted to reform legislature to accommodate these peoples; the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments were passed in the South, granting blacks equality and the right to vote, and the Treaty of Fort Laramie in the West, reserved the Black Hills for the sole use by the Lakota Sioux. Lastly, the United States government used land management as a tool to control both peoples, sharecropping used in the South and the Dawes Act in the