Reconstructors by John Dean Davis

Reconstructors by John Dean Davis

Explores the institutional and environmental transformations that occurred during the Reconstruction Era. 

While the Reconstruction Era in America saw a paradigmatic realignment of the country’s core institutions and values, there was a physical quality to Reconstruction as well: the country was not only rebuilding the South after the Civil War, but flat-out building as it expanded westward. 

In Reconstructors, John Dean Davis details how the Army Corps of Engineers and its subcontractors designed and redesigned the infrastructural landscape to support the republic’s rebirth. The Corps’ projects not only transformed the landscape; they created markets, fostered a distinctive expansionist culture, and—for a time—enacted a less discriminatory economic and social agenda across the South and West. Davis aims to bring federal power, environmentalism, and capitalism into a frame that reveals the landscape's power to further ideology. 

“Reconstructors offers a unique contribution through its expertise on governmental archival sources, Reconstruction-era politics, and the history of engineering and landscapeIn doing so, Davis's work points the way to a more expansive framing of the range of possible postbellum relationships between the federal government and southern African Americans.”

John Dean Davis is assistant professor of landscape architecture in the Knowlton School at Ohio State University.