Ithaca College

Professor Trotti presented a paper titled "Glossing the Text of White Supremacy, 1904" as a part of the panel "Reframing Reconstruction and Race in the Era of Jim Crow" at the 2014 SHA meeting in Atlanta.

This paper evaluates the flurry of essays that southern white supremacist novelist Thomas Nelson Page published in national periodicals in 1904 (then collected them into a book The Negro: The Southerner's Problem), and the many and varied responses to them of African American public figures, who crafted their own alternative visions of race and Reconstruction.  Key to these competing "usable pasts" were northern white editors, who, in this era, allowed southern whites like Page free access to their journals, while typically declining to publish the work of African Americans.