Reconstruction: A Concise History

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The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction

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The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

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The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction

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The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War: 1848-1861

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Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War

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Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

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The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The "Great Truth" about the "Lost Cause"

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The Whig Party: The History and Legacy of the Influential Political Party in 19th Century America

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Juneteenth: The History and Legacy of the Holiday that Commemorates the End of Slavery in the South

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Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution

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Freedom National: The destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865

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The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson: The History and Legacy of the First Attempt to Impeach an American President

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Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies

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A People’s History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom

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Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy

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To Make Our World Anew: Volume II: A History of African Americans from 1880

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The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government

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Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, the Bill of Rights, and the Election That Saved a Nation

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Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War

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The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

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Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement from the Revolution to Reconstruction

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Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction

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Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

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American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt

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Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965

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Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

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Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution

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The Know Nothing Party: The History and Legacy of America’s Most Notorious Nativist Political Party

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African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

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The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

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Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

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Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor

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Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett

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Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

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1776

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Sins of the Founding Father: George Washington, the Indigenous Tribes, and the Decisions that Shaped America’s Future

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The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir

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Land of Delusion: Out on the edge with the crackpots and conspiracy-mongers remaking our shared reality

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The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

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Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

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John Adams

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The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

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Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

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Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

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Summary: Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’ Neill & Dan Piepenbring: Key Takeaways, Summary & Analysis Included

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UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There

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Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida

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Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

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The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

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Lies My Teacher Told Me: 2nd Edition

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Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

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An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

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The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

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The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West

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When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders

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Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America

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Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II

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The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of September 11, 2001

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Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

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Lecture 23 - Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor: Professor Blight begins this lecture in Washington, where the passage of the first Reconstruction Act by Congressional Republicans radically altered the direction of Reconstruction. The Act invalidated the reconstituted Southern legislatures, establishing five military districts in the South and insisting upon black suffrage as a condition to readmission. The eventful year 1868 saw the impeachment of one president (Andrew Johnson) and the election of another (Ulysses S. Grant). Meanwhile, southern African Americans struggle to reap the promises of freedom in the face of economic disempowerment and a committed campaign of white supremacist violence. Transcript Lecture Page

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Lecture 21 - Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction: In this lecture, Professor Blight begins his engagement with Reconstruction. Reconstruction, Blight suggests, might best be understood as an extended referendum on the meaning of the Civil War. Even before the war's end, various constituencies in the North attempted to control the shape of the post-war Reconstruction of the South. In late 1863, President Abraham Lincoln offered his lenient "Ten Percent Plan." Six months later, Congressional Republicans concerned by Lincoln's charity rallied behind the more radical provisions of the Wade-Davis Bill. Despite their struggle for control over Reconstruction, Congressional Radicals and President Lincoln managed to work together on two vital pieces of Reconstruction legislation in the first months of 1865--the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery in the United States, and the Freedmen's Bureau bill. Transcript Lecture Page

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Bacon’s Rebellion, Part 1

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297 Claudio Saunt, Indian Removal Act of 1830: The history of Native American land dispossession is as old as the story of colonization. European colonists came to the Americas, and the Caribbean, wanting land for farms and settlement so they found ways to acquire lands from indigenous peoples by...

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Flags of Our Fathers: One of the most iconic photographs of all time is the famous Joe Rosenthal photo of the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi in the southwest corner of Iwo Jima. In Flags of Our Fathers, director Clint Eastwood weaves together the story of...

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Lecture 6 - Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850: In this lecture, Professor Blight discusses some of the conflicts, controversies, and compromises that led up to the Civil War. After analyzing Frederick Douglass's 1852 Fourth of July speech and the inherent conflict between American slavery and American freedom, the lecture moves into a lengthy discussion of the war with Mexico in the 1840s. Professor Blight explains why northerners and southerners made "such a fuss" over the issue of slavery's expansion into the western territories. The lecture ends with the crisis over California's admission to statehood and the Compromise of 1850. Transcript Lecture Page

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Lecture 18 - "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad: This lecture probes the reasons for confederate defeat and union victory. Professor Blight begins with an elucidation of the loss-of-will thesis, which suggests that it was a lack of conviction on the home front that assured confederate defeat, before offering another of other popular explanations for northern victory: industrial capacity, political leadership, military leadership, international diplomacy, a pre-existing political culture, and emancipation. Blight warns, however, that we cannot forget the battlefield, and, to this end, concludes his lecture with a discussion of the decisive Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July of 1863. Transcript Lecture Page

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Reconstruction 101: Progress and Backlash: Just months after the Civil War ended, former Confederates had regained political footholds in Washington, D.C. In her overview of Reconstruction, Kate Masur notes how—in the face of evolving, post-slavery white supremacy—Black people claimed...

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Lecture 25 - The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877": This lecture focuses on the role of white southern terrorist violence in brining about the end of Reconstruction. Professor Blight begins with an account the Colfax Massacre. Colfax, Louisiana was the sight of the largest mass murder in U.S. history, when a white mob killed dozens of African Americans in the April of 1873. Two Supreme Court decisions would do in the judicial realm what the Colfax Massacre had done in the political. On the same day as the Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court offered a narrow reading of the 14th Amendment in the Slaughterhouse cases, signaling a judicial retreat from the radicalism of the early Reconstruction years. The Cruikshank case, two years later, would overturn the convictions of the only three men sentenced for their involvement in Colfax, and marked another step away from reconstruction. Professor Blight concludes with the Panic of 1873 and the seemi

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Lecture 2 - Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region: Professor Blight offers a number of approaches to the question of southern distinctiveness. The lecture offers a survey of that manner in which commentators--American, foreign, northern, and southern--have sought to make sense of the nature of southern society and southern history. The lecture analyzes the society and culture of the Old South, with special emphasis on the aspects of southern life that made the region distinct from the antebellum North. The most lasting and influential sources of Old South distinctiveness, Blight suggests, were that society's anti-modernism, its emphasis on honor, and the booming slave economy that developed in the South from the 1820s to the 1860s. Transcript Lecture Page

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The Other Slavery – w/ Andrés Reséndez: A hundred years before the first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, Europeans introduced the commercial practice of enslavement in “The New World.” And for the next 400 years, millions of Indigenous people throughout the Americas...

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128 Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History: Historians often portray the American Revolution as an orderly, if violent, event that moved from British colonists’ high-minded ideas about freedom to American independence from Great Britain and the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. But...

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Criminalizing Blackness: Prisons, Police and Jim Crow – w/ Robert T. Chase and Brandon T. Jett: After emancipation, aspects of the legal system were reshaped to maintain control of Black lives and labor. Historian Robert T. Chase outlines the evolution of convict leasing in the prison system. And Historian Brandon T. Jett explores the commercial...

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The Essential Kerner Commission Report: In 1968, the Kerner Commission wrote, "white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto." Here's how they reached a conclusion that still rings true today.

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The History of Whiteness and How We Teach About Race: Historian Ed Baptist provides context on the creation and enforcement of a U.S. racial binary that endures today, as well as Black resistance as a force for political change. And Aisha White urges educators to ask themselves, “What did you learn...

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W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction in America: Dr. Gerald Horne joins Breht and to launch our new series on the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous American sociologist, Marxist socialist, esteemed historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist, starting with his major work Black...

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Introducing ‘1619,’ a New York Times Audio Series

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Michael Joseph Roberto, "The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940" (Monthly Review Press, 2018): An interview with Michael Joseph Roberto

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Koritha Mitchell, “Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930” (University of Illinois Press, 2012): Koritha Mitchell‘s Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2012) is, as described on the publisher’s webpage, “the first full-length critical study of lynching plays ...

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Lecture 24 - Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption": This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an "end" to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of "Carpetbag rule" in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth suggests that the southern governments of the Reconstruction era were dominated by unscrupulous and criminal Yankees who relied on the ignorant black vote to rob and despoil the innocent South. The reality, of course, diverges widely from this image. Among other accomplishments, the Radical state governments that came into existence after 1868 made important gains in African-American rights and public education. Professor Blight closes the lecture with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the waning radicalism of the Republican party after 1870, and the rise of white political terrorism across the South. Transcript Lecture

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Fergus Bordewich: President Grant’s War Against the Ku Klux Klan: Join us for a special online-only program as Bordewich shares the stunning history of the first national anti-terrorist campaign waged on American soil, as Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK.

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141. Richard Kreitner — Break it Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union: The provocative thesis of is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t...

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#1572 Ten Things: The Post-Civil War Amendments: This week, Clay’s conversation with favorite guest Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. All ratified between December 1865 and February 1870, these three key amendments are in some respects...

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Reconstruction Era | Impeachment | 3

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J. Douglas Smith, “On Democracy’s Doorstep” (Hill and Wang, 2014): This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, a legal revolution with far-reaching cultural, political, and economic import. But as J. Douglas Smith argues in On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Cour...

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Reconstruction Era | The Radical Revolution | 2

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Political Parties - The Golden Age of the GOP | 4

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Analysis of the Greatest Speeches in American History-Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

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Kermit Roosevelt III, "The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story" (U Chicago Press, 2022): An interview with Kermit Roosevelt III

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The Reconstruction Era & its Aftermath