单选题 . ①Following the United States Civil War (1861-1865), many former slaves in the rural South became sharecroppers (raising a landlord's crop for a share of the profits) or tenant farmers (selling what they raised and paying a share of the profits as rent). ②Most historians tend to depict these African Americans as victims of racism and the farm tenancy system. ③This approach, however, overlooks the role played by such African American rural reformers as Robert Lloyd Smith, founder of the Farmers' Improvement Society of Texas, and Joseph Elward Clayton, the first African American to organize farmers' institutes for the Texas Department of Agriculture. ④Both men advocated comfortable homes and better schools for African Americans; both attributed poverty and illiteracy to causes other than racism, such as insect damage to crops; and both worked to keep Black farmers on the land, although Smith opposed farm tenancy. ⑤Both were also accused by their contemporaries of downplaying the devastating impact of the farm tenancy system on Black farmers and of accommodating racism. ⑥While the extent of these reformers' influence requires more study, clearly their organizations provided a voice for African American farmers seeking to improve their positions in the agrarian South.

8. The passage is primarily concerned with ______

A、 restoring the reputations of two reformers whose accomplishments have long been denigrated by historians
B、 refuting criticisms of two reformers made by their contemporaries by demonstrating that those criticisms are baseless
C、 providing evidence to support a claim that historians' understanding of a particular phenomenon may be incomplete
D、 discussing some of the reasons that two reformers who were well-known during their lifetimes are considered by historians today to have been ineffective
E、 suggesting an alternative interpretation of the effect of the farm tenancy system on the economy of the rural South following the Civil War

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】 C：evidence指的就是史密斯和克莱顿的研究。历史学家只认为是偏见和佃农制影响了非裔美国人，但是两个人还关注了别的，这说明历史学家的观点是不完整的。
A：过分强调两个人的名誉，但是本文关注的是学术研究的正确性，和名誉关系不大。
B：文章只是在支持这两个人的观点，没有反驳那些批判两个人的人。
D：没提today。另外，文中的历史学家没有批判两位改革家，这些历史学家只是没有看到偏见和佃农制的正面作用，批判了改革家的是改革家同时代的批判者。
E：文中唯一提及的佃农制的影响就是可能影响了非裔美国人，没有alternative。