The American Civil War, Episode 16: Reconstruction

Reconstruction was the process by which all the states that had seceded from the United States were reintegrated into the Union. It is also the time when Constitutional Amendments were ratified that laid the framework to give Civil Rights to African-Americans. Those amendments, thankfully, proved to be resilient as nearly every other bit of social justice progress made in the Reconstruction era was challenged and repressed by a white supremacist society, by hostile Southern state and local governments, and by the Hayes Administration that removed federal military protection in the South. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments laid the framework for the Civil Rights Era a century later.