Curated category
Reconstruction era
- Fourteenth Amendment to the United States ConstitutionOn the 18th of June 1866, both houses of Congress passed a concurrent resolution requesting President Andrew Johnson to transmit the Fourteenth Amendment…
- Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction eraIn 1876, the presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden ended in a national crisis that would reshape American democracy for…
- Fifteenth Amendment to the United States ConstitutionIn the final years of the American Civil War, Congress repeatedly debated the rights of millions of black freedmen. By 1869, amendments had been passed to…
- Reconstruction AmendmentsThomas Nast's the 12th of January 1867 illustration for Harper's Weekly declared slavery dead with a single stroke of ink.
- Radical RepublicansThe Radical Republicans emerged from the ashes of the Whig Party in 1854, six years before the Civil War began. They called themselves "Radicals" because…
- Compromise of 1877On the morning of the 2nd of March 1877, President pro tempore Thomas W. Ferry announced that Rutherford B. Hayes had been elected president by an electoral…
- Freedmen's BureauThe Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands opened its doors on the 3rd of March 1865. President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill creating this…
- Thirteenth Amendment to the United States ConstitutionThe United States Constitution of 1787 contained no word for slave or slavery, yet it embedded the institution into the nation's legal DNA.
- Reconstruction eraOn the 9th of April 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House.
- Lost Cause of the ConfederacyThe term Lost Cause first appeared in the title of an 1866 book by Virginian journalist Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War…
- Nadir of American race relationsRayford Logan published a book in 1954 that named the years from 1877 to 1901 as the nadir of American race relations. He argued this period marked when…