Reconstruction

Some freedpeople ended up owning parcels of the land they had worked when enslaved. Some formed intentional communities to farm it. By the end of Reconstruction, most of them had no land to their names.

Amy Murrell Taylor is the author of The Divided Family in Civil War America.

1. Complete episode
2. How Homesteading Failed
3. How Andrew Johnson Doomed the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony
4. After Emancipation, Here's What Happened When Slave Owners Had to Start Paying "The Help"

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We discuss two Northern men—one white, one black—who gained local offices in the South after the war, and how town and county politics affected their efforts to help freedpeople.

Ed Ayers is author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America.

1. Complete episode

Enslaved men went from being property to being citizens, with supposedly equal protection of the law, in a few short years. But how radical was the vision of freedmen’s rights that was laid out during Reconstruction?

Aderson François is a professor of law at Georgetown and director of the Institute for Public Representation Civil Rights Law Clinic.

1. Complete episode
2. How Black Americans Learned to Read During Reconstruction, When All the Books Were Racist

For a few short years, the South Carolina State House of Representatives was majority black. The state had a black secretary of state, a black State Supreme Court justice, and several black representatives in Congress.

Kate Masur is the author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C..

1. Complete episode: The Smearing of America's First Black Legislators
2. Why Public Transportation Was One of the First Battlegrounds for Post-Emancipation Civil Rights

The collapse of the antebellum Southern legal order left freedpeople exposed to violence from whites desperately trying to re-establish racial hierarchies. Some black people tried to defend themselves, acquiring weapons and forming militias. How common—and how effective—was that strategy?

Kidada Williams is the author of They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I.

1. Complete episode: When Tyranny Happened
2. How a 19th-Century Fight Over Theatergoing Transformed Our Understanding of Human Rights

Our penultimate episode looks at the long collapse of Reconstruction, as symbolized by the violent overthrow of a rightfully-elected biracial government in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898.

Kendra Field is the author of the forthcoming book Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War.

1. Complete episode

In our last episode, we try to put all the pieces together. We’ll talk about the memory of Reconstruction over the years since its collapse, tracing how white and black communities have assessed the experiments of that decade-plus differently.

Richard White is the author of The Republic For Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896.

1. Complete episode: Reconstruction, Reconstructed
2. When Black Women Reclaimed Their Bodies