Southern Reconstruction

While the Rest of the Country Enjoyed a Gilded Age, the Deep South Descended into Devastating Poverty
The Reconstruction Era—the years immediately following the Civil War when Congress directed the reintegration of the former Confederate states into the Union—remains, as historian Eric Foner suggests, “America’s unfinished revolution.” But Reconstruction is more than a story of great racial injustice; it has left a complex legacy involving both blacks and whites, Southerners and Northerners...