Blood Terrain Clinton Analysis

The academic journal article up for reading and discussion for this week is titled Blood Terrain: Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence During Reconstruction by Catherine Clinton. In this brief twenty page work, Clinton narrows her focus on the history of the Reconstruction era to the undersold experience of black freedwomen who underwent monstrous and routine sexual abuse and rape by white southerners. My initial impression of this article is that it succinctly captures the rotten history of America by explicitly exploring the experiences of sexual violence against black women during reconstruction, a history that implicitly the American public knows, or at least feels. The purpose of Clinton’s article is to convey and expose how white supremacism or racism basis has …show more content…
Countering the conventional viewpoint, Clinton dispute how inclusion of gender and sexuality into the history of the Reconstruction era is never too late, exemplified by this article. Nevertheless, in my opinion this article is written with a very academic voice and form. I would recommend that Clinton takes the time to give the reader greater context to the historic institutions such as the Freedman's Beuro, and reorganizing her arguments chronologically to simplify the readers interpretation. Given these improvements, I recommend this article to amateur historians, middle to older age students, social service workers, and political figures. This article could be used to contribute to the historical record of the Reconstruction Era by focusing on the under-told experience of black women, which gives perspective to the historical context of the modern day, and how these described tactics are still used by white supremacist to suppress non-white voice and