I recently moved to a part of the Southern US that was majority black after the Civil War. I have been reading about the county history and found some problematic framing of events. Simply put, the descriptions on Wikipedia and other online history sites seem to describe the county political conflicts as a fight between white folks about government corruption that just happened to end with disenfranchisement of the black population. The accounts leave out the black residents who were shot and killed and all the black Republican leaders forced to leave (including school teachers and elected officials) under threat of lynching. Not a single black person is named. The history seems to be almost entirely based on a single book written 40 years ago.
How would a historian go about adding to or clarifying the history here? A journal article? A new book? Some Wikipedia edits to add in important information? As an amateur, is it pointless for me to do anything?
This is something I do frequently. Most Reconstruction history is whitewashed in the South. So is much of the history of the early 20th century.
To put it very simply, you pick a topic, pick a medium, and tell the history factually in that medium whether it a blog or journal article.
You could do this on a blog or website of your own creation. Or write a journal article, or a book.
If you have specific things in mind, I can be more specific in guiding you toward a medium that may be an appropriate outlet.
If it is the history of a lower political subdivision such as a history or county, you have two options. You can write a book or series of articles that tells the history as it happened, or so an article simply correcting the misconceptions that are published. I prefer the former to the latter because I prefer not repeating the inaccurate history if it can at all be helped.
Many counties in Texas and the South were controlled by large blocks of black voters in the early Reconstruction Era. They elected black legislators and local officials.
Often I run across the history of singular individuals that have been whitewashed to a few lines in their obits of a white newspaper such as, “he was a credit to his race,” with no mention of actual achievement.
The records of actual achievement are there. Constitutional Conventions and early Reconstruction legislatures have multiple examples of such things.
More than being whitewashed, however, the history most often just isn’t well told or isn’t told at all. Even black authors, especially of local histories, sometimes downplayed things or played up things like slavery not being so bad for whatever reason.
Most often whitewashed history is the history that seems significant but is marginalized down to a single paragraph in a larger work. Often, that paragraph itself could be a chapter, or at least a few pages.