Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know.

You're listening to the Tom Woods Show.

Hi everybody. Tom Woods here. It's episode 2731 of the Tom Wood Show. And it's been a while since we've covered a strictly historical topic, which is odd since I am a historian by profession. But we are putting an end to that drought of historical topics with this discussion today with Phil Lee, whom I'm very glad to have join us today.

He is the author of numerous books, but Southern Reconstruction is what we're going to talk about

today.

And Southern Reconstruction is the book when I was trying to find out what these days are people

who, I don't know, let's say might broadly fall into our camp philosophically, point to as the

best modern summary that looks at the matter without an ideological axe to grind and tries to be

reasonable to both sides. And overwhelmingly, I was hearing that it was this particular book,

which I'd heard about but hadn't read, and this gave me an opportunity to read it. So, Phil, I'm really glad to have you here. Thank you very much. Well, thank you for the couple. That's appreciate it. First of all, we're talking about reconstruction. Most of my listeners are from the United States, but not all. So I'll say that for reconstruction, we're talking about the period, let's say late during during the Civil War or War between the States, and continuing into the post-war period, the idea being, what do we do with the Union now, what do we do with the Southern States at this point, what should be the process of reintegrating them into the Union, and there were multiple different approaches to this, different levels of severity, different questions of whether it should be administered by the executive branch or by Congress and so on and so forth.

But this particular topic, I think it's of great significance not just because of the years in which it occurred, but it's still in a way significant today.

The way we look at reconstruction is often

an echo of the way we look at the history of the United States itself. So why of all topics

did you choose this one? Well, I felt it was really misunderstood. Since the 1960s, almost all of

the historians that write about it are focused on the black experience.

And the books that we get now almost ignore how whites were affected by this.

It's interesting, the way is presented ignores some significant facts.

For example, the tariffs prior to the Civil War averaged 19%. For the next 50 years,

they averaged 45%. And the tariffs were protective tariffs, basically deterrence tariffs,

that kept competitive products out of this market. And the only way to pay for them was with other

exchange or gold. And the way we got other exchange was by exporting products to other countries.

And the South played a major role in that. The way the subject is generally portrayed, it's a

...