A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sinha enlarges the temporal boundaries students are accustomed to by covering the end of the 19th century into the Progressive era with the 19th Amendment.

James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?

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

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.

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

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

The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments tried to remove the power of the states to impede key rights.

Democrats need to face up to their constitutional duty without fear.

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

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

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