Reconstruction Amendments

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

Even before the United States regulated migration, states did. Here’s why.

Three years later, amid another national election, the American public is still slow to understand the enormity of January 6, 2021.

The “historian general” of the United Daughters of the Confederacy began the battle over the depiction of the South in history textbooks that continues today.

In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the document has doomed our politics. But it can also save them.

The Supreme Court Justice's defense of Plessy v. Ferguson in a 1993 memo continues to influence the court's interpretation of the 14th amendment.

In northern Louisiana, white supremacists slaughtered 150 African Americans, brutally thwarting their hopes for autonomy and self-governance.

Two new books ask us to shift our attention away from the white vigilantes of Jim Crow and instead focus on what it meant for the survivors.

The Framers would have never tolerated debt-limit brinkmanship. It’s time to put this terrible idea on trial.

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

On the persistent myth of the colorblind Constitution that the Supreme Court's conservatives have embraced.

How the Supreme Court has weaponized the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education against antiracism.

How the defeat of the 1890 Lodge bill presaged today’s age of ballot-driven backlash.

A new history of the Civil War and Reconstruction examines the ways in which Black Americans formed networks of self-reliance in their pursuit of emancipation.

The legislature established a committee last year to “promote patriotic education.” Drafts of one of its pamphlets reveal an effort to sanitize history.

The foremost challenge of Grant’s day has not gone away. His response to it merits our attention.

Fights over fugitive slave laws pitted states against each other and showcased the risks of the federal government not supporting liberty.

Emancipation Days symbolized America’s attempt to free the enslaved across the nation. But those days were unable to prevent new forms of economic slavery.

A brief scholarly overview to understand the contours of white backlashes, their historical impact, and the ways they shape the world we inherit.

The Washington Post has compiled the first database of slaveholding members of Congress by examining thousands of census records and historical documents.