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Reconstruction
In one of the most remarkable about-faces in American history, Confederate general James Longstreet became a strong supporter of Reconstruction during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant.
Editor’s Note: Elizabeth R. Varon is a professor of American History at the University of Virginia.
A critical but forgotten part of the Civil Rights era was the campaign to undo the white supremacist constitutions in many states.
Editor’s note: A.E. Dick Howard is the longest serving law professor at the University of Virginia and an internationally respected authority on constitutional law.
Although he was scrupulously honest, Andrew Johnson angered members of Congress by thwarting their plans for Reconstruction.
The administration of Andrew Johnson, which began upon Lincoln's assassination in April, 1865, was predominantly concerned with redefining the status and rights of people, both black and white, living in the defeated Confederate states.
Lincoln painstakingly evolved a plan for harmonious reconstruction of the Union, which Radical Republicans moved to sabotage
Lincoln painstakingly evolved a plan for harmonious reconstruction of the Union, which Radical Republicans moved to sabotage
Would the disastrous Reconstruction era have taken a different course?
What would have happened had Abraham Lincoln not been assassinated? Every time I lecture on Lincoln, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, someone in the audience is sure to pose this question—one, of course, perfectly natural to ask, but equally impossible to answer. This has not, however, deterred historians from speculating about this “counterfactual” problem.
One of Lee’s greatest lieutenants is slowly winning his reputation back after losing it for daring to criticize his boss.
Since the Civil War, the nation has sent just four African-Americans to the Senate. Why?
The disputed election of "His Fraudulency" Rutherford B. Hayes ended the era of Reconstruction.
Last February, the White House was jubilant over the outcome of the election held in Nicaragua, where voters turned out the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front, which has run the country since 1979, as well as its president, Daniel Ortega.
The Fifteenth Amendment, like the Fourteenth, was almost strangled in its cradle.
On the morning after Election Day in 1989, history had been made in a normally dull “off-year” race. The Democrat Douglas Wilder won the governorship of the Commonwealth of Virginia, although the margin was so thin the Republicans demanded a recount.
Whatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post-Civil War era is probably wrong in the light of recent study
A TALE OF RECONSTRUCTION
Of the turbulent career of Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, adventurer, operator, and first black governor of Louisiana. He reminds one powerfully, says the author, of the late Adam Clay ton Powell, Jr.
His name seems pure invention —Pinckney B. S. Pinchback. It sounds so much like pinchbeck , dictionary-defined as “counterfeit or spurious,” that one suspects a joke by political enemies.
Was it, as Navy Secretary Welles believed, “a conspiracy to overthrow the government”?
One of the saddest tales in American history tells how a well-intentioned President lost a dazzling opportunity
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