Don’t skip the chapter after the Civil War. But the notion that Reconstruction was a terrible mistake, a rape of the South by the unscrupulous and the vengeful that could only be redressed by letting ...

Part I: Reconstructing the nation. Prologue: Mourning Lincoln ; In the wake of the War ; Radical reconstruction ; The greater reconstruction ; Home ; Gilded liberals ; Triumph of wage labor ; Panic ; ...

The tragic legend of reconstruction -- Abraham Lincoln: the politics of a practical Whig -- Andrew Johnson: the last Jacksonian -- Triumph of the radicals -- Radical ...