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The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Grappling With the Overthrow of Reconstruction

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.
Hands holding pregnant woman's stomach.

Black Women and the Racialization of Infanticide

Loss of control over knowledge of the female body cemented women’s status as second-class citizens.
Emblem an eye looking down on a winged globe above an ancient Egyptian landscape and the word "try".

The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics

How dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.
Painting of ships in Boston Harbor.

Pressured to Leave

Black refugees’ journey from Virginia to Boston after the Civil War.
Donald Trump supporters storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The Failure of Reconstruction Is to Blame for the Weakness of American Democracy

A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War.
George Wallace pointing to map of United States with "Wallace Country" written on it.

How the Right Turned “Freedom” Into a Dog Whistle

A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government.
Engraving of freed slaves arriving at Union lines, New Bern, North Carolina, 1863.

The Emancipators’ Vision

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?
Eric Foner sits in an arm chair on stage during an interview, holding a microphone.

“Originalism Is Intellectually Indefensible”

On the persistent myth of the colorblind Constitution that the Supreme Court's conservatives have embraced.
photo of C. Vann Woodward, c/o William R. Ferris, Van Every Smith Galleries

What Is There To Celebrate?

A review of "C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian."
Map of Beaufort, South Carolina during the time of Rose Goethe's life.

“They Cleaned Me Out Entirely”

An enslaved woman’s experience with General Sherman’s army.
A group of the newly emancipated working with the US army, 1862.

The Promise of Freedom

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.
Black-and-white photograph of black students sitting in a classroom at the Tuskegee Institute.

The Complicity of the Textbooks

A new book traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.
A vintage public school textbook on the history of Virginia.
partner

The Virginia History its State Board Doesn’t Want Students to Know

Our racial history is complex and important, but debates today are eliding entire chapters of it.
The American flag depicted upside down, in a beige color scheme.

Making the Constitution Safe for Democracy

The second section of the Fourteenth Amendment offers severe penalties for menacing the right to vote—if anyone can figure out how to enforce it.
Portrait of Ulysses S. Grant

Democratic Spirit: Ulysses S. Grant at 200

The foremost challenge of Grant’s day has not gone away. His response to it merits our attention.
Artwork of the Supreme Court but with chess pieces used as columns..

The Supreme Court Is Not Supposed to Have This Much Power

And Congress should claw it back.
Photograph of building at Virginia Union University
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A Formerly Enslaved Woman Helped Found a Key American University

Mary Lumpkin’s life helps us to better understand the post-Civil War push for education.
INTERIM ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES A map of slavery laws in the United States, from 1775 to 1865.

A Reckoning With How Slavery Ended

A new book examines the ways white slaveholders were compensated, while formerly enslaved people were not.
Workers working on ruins after the US Civil War, circa 1865.

The Abolitionist Legacy of the Civil War Belongs to the Left

The US Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property.
A portrait of Abraham Lincoln hangs behind President Biden in the State Dining Room of the White House
partner

Activists Have Always Been Frustrated at Allies’ Insistence on Gradual Change

Why abolitionist Lydia Maria Child raged at President Lincoln’s political calculations.
Four members of House committee on Jan. 6. U.S. Capitol Riot, sitting in a hearing.
partner

What History Says About The Jan. 6 Committee Investigation

The importance of an unambiguous report that cannot be weaponized by Trump supporters.
Hands holding a sign in that reads "DC statehood is racial justice."
partner

Republicans’ Anti-Democratic, Anti-Black Plans for D.C. Are a 19th-Century Throwback

The same ideas that have harmed D.C. for more than a century are again rearing their ugly head.
Map of Freedmans Village

The Long Afterlife of Freedman’s Village

Freedman's Village, created in Arlington, VA at the end of the Civil War, became a thriving community of Black residents as part of Reconstruction.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.

How Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Helped Remake the Literary Canon

The scholar has changed the way Black authors get read and the way Black history gets told.
Protest sign reading "We never left Jim Crow."

Voter Fraud Propagandists Are Recycling Jim Crow Rhetoric

The conservative plot to suppress the Black vote has relied on racist caricatures, then and now.
Picture of the U.S. Supreme Court

Reading the 14th Amendment

A review of three books about Abraham Lincoln, the 14th Amendment, and Reconstruction.
Company of African American soldiers, 1865.

The Racial Politics of Demobilizing USCT Regiments

The inequitable dismissal of US soldiers following the conclusion of the Civil War.
William Faulkner in front of bookshelf

William Faulkner’s Tragic Vision

In Yoknapatawpha County, the past never speaks with a single voice.
‘This Little Boy would persist in handling Books Above His Capacity—and this was the Disastrous Result’; cartoon of Andrew Johnson by Thomas Nast, 1868

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.
Three panels depicting the Freedmen's Bureau, the march for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, and Trump at a podium..

America’s Most Destructive Habit

Each time political minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo.

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