Justin Nystrom's New Orleans after the Civil War takes the Crescent City as a case study through which to refute revisionist historians of the 1960s who, Nystrom argues, see the Reconstruction era through the lens of the civil rights movement. By weaving together personal and public histories which centre on one of the most racially complex cities in the old Confederacy, Nystrom argues that southern white supremacist “Redeemers” were no more ideologically pure than were the Republican advocates of Reconstruction – who should not be viewed as heroes any more than their adversaries should be viewed as villains. In so doing Nystrom poses the relatively fresh question, “to what degree were Reconstruction politics a struggle between freedom and white supremacy as opposed to being merely a bare-knuckle struggle for power?” (85).

In tracing these largely uncharted waters, Nystrom takes us into some morally murky areas that might cause some readers discomfort. He argues, for example, that

While there may be some truth to this statement, its counterintuitive thrust seems to highlight a narrative that resents the turmoil unleashed by the Civil War almost as much as the old Confederacy: “the Civil War was largely responsible for making violence a legitimate extension of political discourse” (80). This resentment seems to go hand in hand with the book's fixation on the seemingly conjoined categories of “manliness” and “honor” that receive rather uncritical treatment in the text. Indeed, the new respect accorded black soldiers fighting in the US army is largely experienced, Nystrom suggests, through this privileged category of existence: “for the first time in their lives, these men existed as men” (33).

New Orleans after the Civil War is the most engaging when it is delineating the transformation of New Orleans's three-tiered racial dynamic of the antebellum period into the black/white binary of the postbellum years. The dilemmas of the city's Afro-Creoles and their white relatives are demonstrated via threads of personal history meticulously charted throughout the book. Though it is notable that no women take centre stage in these accounts, and the narrative arc can at times get lost amidst the detail, Nystrom's emphasis on social history is one of the book's virtues.

Ultimately, the story the book tells does not affirm its earlier sense that “white unity in Redemption was more mirage than anything else” (190). Nystrom rightly emphasizes the chaos that the experience of war brought about and the fact that Louisiana was one of the last southern states to be “redeemed.” But following the Supreme Court ruling of 1896, which saw Homer Plessy, a pale-skinned New Orleans resident, declared legally “black” – thus establishing the so-called “one-drop rule” that exists as a de facto racial categorization in the US to this day – Louisiana instituted a rigid system of segregation in line with other southern states. Alongside disenfranchisement and socially sanctioned violence towards the state's black citizens, this system, the book observes, “mirrored closely the social control of the old slave system” (245). Nystrom's is a valuable attempt to get to grips with the complexities of a period that often did evade the simplistic, binary logic of black and white. But the tale it ultimately tells is not so unfamiliar to students of Reconstruction.