In order to understand the literary production of the period between the American Civil War and the First World War, readers need to be aware of the complex set of narratives that shaped the era. By “narratives,” we mean the stories created to explain national and regional history, institutions, beliefs, and social practices. It is through such stories that national, regional, racial, and gender identities are constructed and justified. Thus, the white South, after the Civil War, reinvented its rebellion and defeat as a tragedy in which a noble cause was overwhelmed by the region's own pride and by massive Northern aggression. This narrative was embodied in “plantation school” fiction by Thomas Nelson Page and others. The Union narrative was divided into separate plots; this division enabled the triumph of white supremacy later in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the North saw itself as attempting to maintain the nation that had been established by the Founding Fathers in the face of Southern assault on that vision. The alternative story represented the war as expansion of the national principles of liberty and justice through the abolition of slavery. In this version, the helpless and needy black population was saved through the courageous actions of Northern white soldiers and politicians against the greedy and lecherous plantation owners. The immediate aftermath of the war was an effort to bring together the Southern story with the first Northern one, as Andrew Johnson largely agreed to allow the South to reenter the Union without fundamental change beyond the constitutional end of slavery.