Following Abraham Lincoln's election as President of the United States in 1861, eleven states withdrew from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, sparking a bitterly contested war between North and South. The casualty figures of 1861-1865 exceed those of American soldiers killed in every other war put together. With maps, portraits, and artifacts from the Smithsonian's unrivaled collections, The Civil War traces the major engagements,...

A history of the Reconstruction period and the movements of reform, immigration, industrialization, and urbanization.

"With the freeing of four million enslaved people after the Civil War, the Reconstruction period brought new victories and challenges in the fight for Black rights. Learn more about this crucial period in US history"--

Uses primary source documents, narrative, and illustrations to recount the history of the Reconstruction, as the United States government and people worked to recover from the effects of the Civil War.

"On Easter Sunday of 1873, just eight years after the Civil War ended, a band of white supremacists marched into Grant Parish, Louisiana, and massacred over one hundred unarmed African Americans. The court case that followed would reach the highest court in the land. Yet, following one of the most ghastly and barbaric incidents of mass murder in American history, not a single person was convicted. The opinion issued by the Supreme Court in US v. Cruikshank...