Ancient History, American Time

This chapter considers the ways Charles Chesnutt and other writers at the turn of the twentieth century critically responded to the project of postbellum national reconciliation, which involved not only a recommitment to national expansion and the increasingly global projection of American power, but also the proliferation of monumental structures and historical celebrations that enabled and justified that imperial agenda. The chapter focuses on Charles Chesnutt’s early work in relation to this resurgent imperial culture of the postbellum United States. While monumental constructions and public rituals commemorating national history aimed to reassert the Jeffersonian notion of the “empire for liberty,” Chesnutt’s early fiction—in alignment with the writings of contemporaries like T. Thomas Fortune and Pauline Hopkins—reads these cultural rituals and artifacts as evidence of the persistence of the “empire of slavery” by another name.