Here's what I was taught about Reconstruction: it happened in the South, it was about Black citizenship, white Southerners ended it, and then we moved on. That's not wrong, exactly. But it's a story with edges cropped off, and the cropped parts change the picture entirely.
Redemption National is where I think out loud about what happens when you put those edges back. When you notice that the same Congress passing the Fourteenth Amendment was also authorizing railroads through Indigenous territory. When you follow the soldiers who fought at Bear River in January 1863 and realize they were California Volunteers, not Union regulars, and that "Indian fighting" and "saving the Union" were, for them, the same job. When "Redemption" stops looking like a Southern backlash and starts looking like a continental stabilization.
I'm not the first person to notice these connections. But I want to make them visible, through writing, through maps, through primary sources you can read yourself, in a way that doesn't require a graduate seminar to follow.
What you'll find here
Blog posts about what I'm finding in the archive and why I think it matters now. Interactive maps that make spatial patterns legible. Timelines that show what was happening simultaneously in places the standard narrative keeps separate. Primary sources with enough context that you can read them yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Some of this will be polished. Some of it will be me working things out. I'll tell you which is which.
About me
I'm Allan Branstiter. I'm an independent historian of the nineteenth-century United States and Latin America. This is a personal project I pursue as a hobby (during the day I work in tech in the San Francisco Bay Area). I'm interested in race, land, sovereignty, and colonialism. I earned a BA in History from Minnesota State University Moorhead, as well as an MA from the University of Southern Mississippi where I studied the War & Society during the Civil War era, Southern history, and Latin American History.
How it's built
This site runs on Node.js with Nunjucks templates and Markdown. Maps use Leaflet. Timelines use D3.js. No frameworks, no build step, no dependencies I can't read. The source code is on GitHub.