Curated category
Reconstruction era
- Fourteenth Amendment to the United States ConstitutionThe Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on the 9th of July, 1868, and it has since become the most litigated part of the…
- Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction eraDisfranchisement after the Reconstruction era describes one of the most deliberate political projects in American history: the systematic stripping of voting…
- Fifteenth Amendment to the United States ConstitutionThe Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on the 3rd of February, 1870, with a single sentence doing the work: the right to vote…
- Reconstruction AmendmentsThe Reconstruction Amendments are three additions to the United States Constitution adopted in a span of just five years, between 1865 and 1870.
- Radical RepublicansThe Radical Republicans named themselves. They did not shy from the word. In a pamphlet directed to black voters in 1867, the Union Republican Congressional…
- Compromise of 1877The Compromise of 1877 resolved one of the most contested presidential elections in American history without a single shot fired.
- Freedmen's BureauOn the 3rd of March, 1865, with the Civil War not yet over, Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.
- Thirteenth Amendment to the United States ConstitutionThe Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was proclaimed on the 18th of December 1865, and with that proclamation, slavery became illegal…
- Reconstruction eraOn the 14th of April 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln died the following morning, and with him went any settled plan…
- Lost Cause of the ConfederacyThe Lost Cause of the Confederacy was not born on a battlefield. It was born in a publisher's office in New York City, where a nervous editor told a…
- Nadir of American race relationsThe nadir of American race relations is the name historians give to what Rayford Logan identified as the worst period for Black Americans after the Civil War.
- Republican Party (United States)The Republican Party was founded in 1854 by a coalition of people with one shared demand: stop the spread of slavery. Within six years, a Republican sat in…