Reconstruction

Used to describe the rebuilding of the Confederate states after the Civil War. The formal Reconstruction era is dated 1865-1877 — from the war's end to the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the disputed presidential election by withdrawing federal troops from the South.

The most contested period in American historiography. For a generation, the dominant narrative — shaped by Southern historians and the Lost Cause tradition — portrayed Reconstruction as a period of Northern oppression and Black incompetence. Revisionist historians from the 1960s onward, led by W.E.B. Du Bois and later Eric Foner, documented it as a genuine democratic experiment — Black political participation, constitutional amendments, public education — betrayed by the withdrawal of federal enforcement. The contemporary understanding is closer to the revisionist account.