gone with the wind book margaret mitchell

During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan came to power, and the idea of the “Lost Cause” (which features prominently in the novel) was developed. It quickly gave way to Jim Crow laws which upheld segregation and took rights away from the Black people Reconstruction sought to help.

Reconstruction ended when Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives and withdrew federal troops from the South.

During this time, three “Reconstruction Amendments” were passed, including the 13th which outlawed slavery, and the 14th and 15th, which guaranteed citizenship and voting rights for formerly enslaved Black people. Reconstruction lasted until 1877, and its main goal was to permanently end slavery and bring the Southern states back into the Union. As Union troops took each Southern state, they freed enslaved people and began the process of Reconstruction. Over its four years, the war resulted in at least a million casualties of soldiers and civilians, most caused by disease. Just after President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated, seven states-including Georgia, where the novel takes place-seceded from the Union. The Civil War was fought between April 1861 and May 1865 over the institution of slavery in the Southern United States. The American Civil War and Reconstruction are the driving forces of Gone with the Wind. She died from her injuries a few days later. In 1949, she was hit by a drunk driver when she was crossing Peachtree Street. Bored and needing something to do, she wrote Gone with the Wind, her only novel, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Between her marriages, she wrote for the Atlanta Journal and continued to publish articles for four years until an ankle injury kept her home. Mitchell then married John Marsh when she was 29. Mitchell was engaged twice and eventually married Kinnard Upshaw, an alcoholic who later physically and emotionally abused her. With her mother’s encouragement, Mitchell attended Washington Seminary and then Smith College. Although Margaret’s brother believed that education ruined girls, her mother believed education was a girl’s tool for survival. Two things that greatly influenced Mitchell when she was a child were the Atlanta Race Riot, as well as accompanying her mother to suffragette meetings (the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, passed when Mitchell was 19). She was an avid reader and writer of stories that often focused on the themes of honor and love. Growing up, Mitchell preferred riding her pony to playing with dolls. However, she did not learn that the South lost the war until she was 10 years old. She grew up in Jackson Hill in Atlanta nearby her crude and explosive grandmother, from whom she heard firsthand stories about the Civil War. Margaret Mitchell was the daughter of the wealthy attorney Eugene Mitchell and the Irish immigrant and avid suffragette Maybelle Stephens.

Gone with the wind book margaret mitchell