Dr. Kevin Bower, history professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University, joins us on the Front Porch to discuss the Civil War and Reconstruction period, the setting of Nathan Harris’ book The Sweetness of Water. Kevin shares his own path to becoming a history professor and his specialty in the 1930s to present. He tells us the reconstruction era is central to our understanding of more recent American history. Nancy and Linda laugh about their own K-12 history classes that were strong on William Penn, the revolutionary war, and up to Gettysburg. After that, not much more! Kevin describes that most K-12 history is often taught is an origin story “where we came from” and “what big thing happened here,” often missing the connective tissue in between. As a professor, Kevin describes that a broader range of his students are now more conversant in issues around racism, which he finds hopeful. The Civil War has been mythologized in ways that will take time to overcome – that of a tragic era that white people let themselves be divided by this war with the redemption being the restoration of the white man’s republic. Kevin introduces W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction as a book that remains an authoritative framing of the more authentic story of the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Kevin describes the vacuum of information that reigned in Georgia in 1865, the setting of The Sweetness of Water. The state government is in transition, no one is in charge, there is tremendous food insecurity due to crop failures, and there are a lot of people moving (e.g., soldiers, displaced, and formerly enslaved people). Kevin tells us the generation prior to the Civil War saw an unprecedented number of enslaved families being separated as the cotton economy spread westward, now called by some historians the Second Middle Passage. Like Landry and Prentiss in The Sweetness of Water, this means formerly enslaved people moving to find their family. Southern states begin passing laws to restrict the human rights, including the movement of Blacks, including vagrancy laws that define “vagrancy” as being on the road without a job, meaning formerly enslaved people cannot leave their plantations and look for other jobs. This inhibits multiracial equality through many generations. Kevin suggests land reform and serious shifts in the wage labor system could have led to a true multiracial democracy. Indeed, Kevin suggests that economic equality may be the most powerful remedy to racial inequality. Kevin observes that understanding of the experience of Blacks in our country may lead to greater fairness and he sees signs of hope. He echoes Ta-Nehisi Coates in observing that it does mean something that white people in small towns in North Dakota were protesting George Floyd's murder.