Intro
Robert Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee. His research explores questions of race and memory in the postbellum United States.
He is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the legacy of Robert Smalls and Radical Reconstruction in African American political culture.
Work
My research and writing has appeared in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, Black Perspectives, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. I am currently working on a book-length project on the Reconstruction era.
Public Writing
“On Riots and Resistance: Freedpeople’s Struggle against Police Brutality during Reconstruction” Muster, Blog of the Journal of the Civil War Era, August 11, 2020
“Riot on the Combahee: Organized Black Resistance and the End of Reconstruction,” The University of Tennessee, Department of History, June 16, 2020
“An Unreconstructed Nation: On Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s ‘Stony the Road,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 10, 2019
“‘A Grim Memorial of Its Thorough Work of Devastation and Desolation’: Race and Memory in the Aftermath of the 1893 Sea Island Storm,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17 (April 2018): 297-318 (Honorable mention for 2020 Best article prize)
“Muhammad Ali, Freedom Road, and the Legacy of Reconstruction,” Black Perspectives, June 24, 2016