There seems to be a dearth of historians interested in the post-civil war south. I really wonder about the period 1865-1914: while you had the rest of the USA energized and looking west 9the great migration to california got underway0, and the USA became an international power (Sp[anish-American war of 1898), the postwar South seemed to slumber on in a time warp. It seems 9to me0 that as the old southern aristocracy 9the ones that didn’t die in the war0 slipped into poverty and decay, the young and energetic left for greener pastures. Of course, you had a few bright spots (Atlanta began to boom after 1870 or so); but the overall picture is pretty depressing-disgruntled veterans revive the KK, the ex-slave slip into poverty (via sharecropping), and diseases like hookworm kill a lot of initiative. It’s like a faulkner novel-endless decline and decay.
Sowas reconstruction all that bad? As a northerner, i see the South as economically stagnant, until the end of WWI. What do recent historians fell about this era? 
I don’t know about recent historians, but both Eric Foner and C. Vann Woodward have had some extraordinarily fascinating things to say about Reconstruction and the period immediately following it.
Try Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, by Eric Foner.
Mostly decay, but I wouldn’t blame it on Reconstruction. Reconstruction, for all its many faults, was a well-intentioned but half-hearted attempt to change the Southern political and legal culture. Until the corrupt bargain that gave Hayes the Presidency after the 1876 election but led to the withdrawal of Federal troops, Reconstruction was working, after a fashion. But Northerners grew weary of continuing racial and political violence in the South. The Southern plantation aristocratic “slave power” morphed after 1865 while still largely holding the reins of power. Jim Crow kept down the black population and ossified the social structure. The Democratic Party (and it pains me, as a Democrat, to say it) became even more regionally dominant and voters had little real choice. More’s the pity - a dark time in American history.
The era you’ve bracketed (1865-1914) includes a great deal more than Reconstruction. Most historians consider Reconstruction to have ended with the Compromise of 1877, and it ended even earlier than that in most Southern states.
Obviously, these weren’t good years (1865-1914) for the South as a whole. Recovery from the Civil War was painfully slow. Historians have debated why it was so slow—in more recent times, after all, Germany and Japan have recovered from even worse wartime destruction faster than the postwar South.
The political turmoil associated with Reconstruction didn’t help, nor did the apartheid-style segregation imposed by law during the 1890’s. But neither offers a full explanation—Reconstruction, again, was over by 1877, and as bad as Jim Crow was, it couldn’t have been worse than chattel slavery. The best explanation I’ve read is that the national banking system introduced during the Civil War, which was skewed to favor Northern banks, made it difficult for Southerners to obtain the credit necessary to restore agricultural prosperity and industrialize.
All that happened because Reconstruction failed, in the face of white Southern resistance. If it had succeeded, the South between 1865 and 1918 probably would have been more prosperous and civilized. The South, remember, didn’t really become an economic powerhouse until after Jim Crow was abolished in the 1960s.