Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise

Reconstruction begins where, for most Americans, the story of the Civil War ends: The North is victorious and slavery is abolished. But what happened next was one of the most important decades in American history, a moment when our country grappled with its original sin and imagined — and briefly enacted — a more perfect union. Drawing from archives, letters, diaries, court records, eyewitness testimonies and some of America’s most accomplished scholars and storytellers, the series explores this unprecedented historical moment in rich, kaleidoscopic detail. It unpacks a time when a determined band of reformers attempted to radically reimagine American society — from the Constitution to the roots of its economy to the very nature of citizenship itself.