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

This session has been postponed, please check back on our website to see about a rescheduled date.

This session is sponsored by the American Historical Association.

We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, when freedpeople and the federal government attempted to create an interracial democracy in the south after the Civil War. That effort was overthrown and serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality. In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the usual temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction (1865–1877) to explain how the Civil War, the overthrow of Reconstruction, the conquest of the west, labor conflict in the north, Chinese exclusion, women’s suffrage, and the establishment of an overseas American empire were part of the same struggle between the forces of democracy and those of reaction. Highlighting the critical role of black people in redefining American citizenship and governance, Sinha’s book shows that Reconstruction laid the foundation of our democracy.

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellowship in 2022. She is the 2024 President-elect of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico and featured in The New York Times 1619 Project. Her recent book The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, which won the Frederick Douglass, Avery Craven, James Rawley, and SHEAR Best Book prizes, was also long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partner (the George Washington University History Department) for their continued support.