While they advanced African American rights, they had serious flaws, Eric Foner writes.

A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.

During Reconstruction, elites used racist appeals to silence calls for redistribution and worker empowerment.

The first revolution articulated American ideals. The second enacted them.

Americans should build this pivotal post–Civil War era into the new politics of historical memory.

“No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth: What shall be done with slaves?”

Can we reanimate the dream of freedom that Congress tried to enact in the wake of the Civil War?

How a post-Civil War massacre impacted racial justice in America.

At the height of the Reconstruction, the pressing issue of the election was Black male suffrage.

We say we’re for it. We’ve never truly had it. These next few years will determine its fate.

The Texan newspaperman who was born into slavery and helped shape the history of civil rights.

A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War.

We cannot be confident that our institutions are protected by some immutable law.

The second section of the Fourteenth Amendment offers severe penalties for menacing the right to vote—if anyone can figure out how to enforce it.

Rebels in the post-Civil War South perfected the art of excluding voters, but it was yankees in the North who developed the script.

The 1868 presidential election through the eyes of a Southern white woman.

As the GOP undermines Black political rights in the present, some right-wing intellectuals are rationalizing Black disenfranchisement in the past.

Take a deep dive into this drawing by famed illustrator Thomas Nast.

James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?

The most radical Radical Republicans had a better idea of how to cast the 15th Amendment. We should have listened to them.