"The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920" 

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920" with Manisha Sinha
Tuesday, March 26, 2024, at 7:00 pm ET
Acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha launches her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction in this hybrid program. A groundbreaking, expansive new account of Reconstruction, Sinha's research fundamentally alters our view of this formative period in American history.
We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant South. That effort failed-and that failure serves as a warning today about the violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality.
Sinha will expand our view beyond the accepted notions of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in 1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the “corrupt bargain” of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the fall of the last southern Reconstruction state governments. Sinha’s startlingly original account opens in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln that triggered the secession of the Deep South states and took us all the way to 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote-which Sinha calls the “last Reconstruction amendment.”
A sweeping narrative that remakes our understanding of perhaps the most consequential period in American history, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic shows how the great contest of that age is also the great contest of our age-and serves as a necessary reminder of how young and fragile our democracy truly is.