It is common for historians of the antebellum, civil war, and reconstruction-era United States to talk of ‘the Northeast’, ‘the South’, or ‘the West’ as offhand for a wide range of interests, like the Confederacy, slaveholders, or industrial capitalism. Nicolas Barreyre’s well-written and largely persuasive account of Reconstruction-era political economy suggests that historians may have to be more careful when using these terms in their own work. Contemporaries, he suggests, conceptualised the American economy in geographic terms, believing it self-evident that the Northeast, South, and Midwest were separate competing economic interest groups with different needs. And no issue was more divisive that the conflict between the North’s supposed need for a stable currency and the Midwest’s professed need for soft money. This leads to Barreyre's more provocative argument: that the ongoing rivalry between North and Midwest, far from taking place separately from the issues of readmission, black suffrage, and land redistribution, in fact guided the course of Reconstruction policy towards the South. Therefore, far from seeing Reconstruction as a contest taking place in Southern state legislatures, union leagues, and plantations, Gold and Freedom reinterprets it as part of the national reconstruction of American economic geography.

中文翻译：

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黄金与自由：重建的政治经济学 Nicholas Barreyre

战前、内战和重建时期美国的历史学家通常会谈论“东北”、“南方”或“西方”，因为它们是为了广泛的利益，如南部邦联、奴隶主，或工业资本主义。尼古拉斯·巴雷尔 (Nicolas Barreyre) 对重建时期政治经济学的写得很好且在很大程度上具有说服力的描述表明，历史学家在他们自己的工作中使用这些术语时可能必须更加小心。他建议，同时代的人从地理角度对美国经济进行概念化，认为东北、南部和中西部是具有不同需求的相互竞争的经济利益集团，这是不言而喻的。没有什么问题比北方所谓的稳定货币需求与中西部声称的软货币需求之间的冲突更具分歧性。这导致 Barreyre' 更具挑衅性的论点：北部和中西部之间持续的竞争远非与重新接纳、黑人选举权和土地重新分配问题分开发生，实际上引导了南部重建政策的进程。因此，Gold 和 Freedom 远没有将重建视为一场发生在南部州立法机构、工会联盟和种植园中的竞赛，而是将其重新解释为美国经济地理国家重建的一部分。