Reconstruction Archives - Public Seminar

History

Why the U.S. Should Convene a 2021 Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

Lessons from the 1871 congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings

November 2, 2020 • by Andrew Wainer

“The truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the master of men wish.” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935 In 1871, in the midst of escalating racial violence that killed up to 30,000 in the post-Civil War South, Congress launched one ...

Harnessing Federal Power for Police Reform in America

What we can learn from Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

July 8, 2020 • by Richard Johnson and Desmond King

History suggests that the response to the current crisis of policing in the United States must be a stronger role for the federal government. Yet few activists within the Movement for Black Lives are demanding that the federal government flex its coercive muscle. Given the racism of the current occupant ...

Impeachment as National Renewal

Can non-democratic institutions be repurposed for democracy?

January 28, 2020 • by Ian Zuckerman and Daniel Kato

All of these authors recognize that these comparisons have limitations. The 1868 impeachment of Johnson failed to remove him from office -- just as, in all likelihood, Trump will remain president after his impeachment. But the deeper problem is that these celebrations of the political potential of impeachment elide its ...