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 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 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 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 emerged from the ashes of the Whig Party in 1854, six years before the Civil War began. They called themselves "Radicals" because…
- Compromise of 1877The Compromise of 1877 resolved one of the most contested presidential elections in American history without a single shot fired.
- 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 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…