The saying goes that the victors write history—unless you are a Confederate in the post-Civil War United States. Then you get to masquerade as the victor. This is the historical knowledge that many of the docents at the Museum of the Reconstruction Era (MoRE) at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home in Columbia, South Carolina, believed prior to their training for the new museum. Their U.S. textbooks taught them that the Republicans—who legislated and enforced Black civil rights—were the villains, the fools, and the drunkards. In contrast, the destroyers of Reconstruction—white Democrats, the Ku Klux Klan, and state militias including Wade Hampton’s Red Shirts in South Carolina, who defrauded, threatened, and murdered southern Black and white Republicans into submission—were celebrated as the heroes of Reconstruction for restoring white supremacy. While historians of Reconstruction will attest that Claude G. Bowers’s description of Reconstruction as The Tragic Era (1929) is fundamentally untrue, there remain many Americans who still believe their childhood education, which taught them that Reconstruction failed due to rampant corruption inflicted by northerners and Republicans. Combating these misinterpretations of Reconstruction and creating a new kind of historic house museum (HHM) is the focus of Jennifer Whitmer Taylor’s book Rebirth: Creating the Museum of the Reconstruction Era and the Future of the House Museum.

This was the premise for the creation of MoRE, which opened in 2014. Historic Columbia wanted the Home, which was unfortunately light on Wilson artifacts, to reflect the state’s curriculum and teach a history of Reconstruction that reflected current-day scholarship, including acknowledging that the period did not suddenly end in 1877, while intertwining that history with the Home’s origins as a Wilson presidential shrine. Thus, they created the first museum solely dedicated to Reconstruction. But MoRE went further. The museum focuses on a bottom-up, social history version of Reconstruction which presented the history of Black domestic servants in the Wilson Home and Black women’s history, as well as exploring the domestic white terrorism which ended Reconstruction. In doing so, they created a more inclusive and radical museum.

Rebirth tells the story of the creation of MoRE. It is divided into two sections. The first part describes the white woman’s group—the American Legion Auxiliary—that saved the Home from demolition and created the Woodrow Wilson Family Home (WWFH) museum in Columbia in the 1920s. This site was a typical presidential shrine, albeit with few authentic artifacts due to Wilson’s second wife, Edith Galt Wilson, favoring their home in Washington, D.C. The book goes on to explore the redesign into MoRE between 2005 and 2014, as well as the docent training process for the new museum. The museum decided to pursue an experimental, semi-guided tour with a pullback technique which required extensive training, including language and sensitivity training. The second part of the book examines four exhibits within MoRE: one on Black domestic servants and role of Black women during Reconstruction; one on the domestic white terrorism which brought Reconstruction to its violent end; one on the historian’s craft of writing history, including Wilson’s role in supporting the Dunning School interpretation of Reconstruction; and one on the memory of Reconstruction and of Wilson. In particular, the book examines Wilson’s decision to show the film The Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915. As a result, Rebirth sheds light on the process through which the WWFH recreated itself, breaking and revolutionizing the traditional HHM format. It moved away from the conventional romantic model and toward “a tragic narrative” that provides no clear answers but asks visitors to reconsider their assumptions about the Reconstruction era (186). In doing so, Taylor argues that MoRE is part of a movement in public history to integrate social histories, especially Black history, into HHMs and to move away from the creation of shrines. But MoRE goes further than most HHMs in making these Black social histories central to the story of Reconstruction during the teenage Wilson’s life rather than tacking them on.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of the creation of MoRE is its potential to deconstruct the indoctrination of the American public on Reconstruction. This process started with its own docents, many of whom had learned about Reconstruction from racist textbooks that celebrated white terrorists, such as the Red Shirts, for redeeming the nation with electoral fraud and violence from the so-called corruption inflicted on states by Black political power. Those who passed the training process were forced to confront their past knowledge of Reconstruction and even family connections to white supremacy. This process placed them in a good position to initiate the deconstruction of others’ beliefs in the Lost Cause and the white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction. But Taylor goes further and argues that with grant funding, MoRE could help with “deradicalizing white nationalists” (168). So far, MoRE’s success has been on a smaller scale. Most of the feedback the museum has received has been positive despite the uncomfortable educational material offered. Taylor suggests that as the American public continues to believe in the white supremacist memory of Reconstruction, public-facing sites such as MoRE are the best place to reeducate people. Perhaps she is right; after all, historians will attest that despite decades of revisionist works, a majority of the American public still believes that Reconstruction was a failure and that Ulysses S. Grant was a drunkard.