Reconstruction: Why We Didn't Learn About It

Civics 101

NHPR

History, Government, Society & Culture

4.2 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Reconstruction Era, a period in American history at the end of and immediately following the Civil War, is one of the single-most important and instructive periods in American history. It has also, historically, been one of the least taught. Why is that, and what are we missing when we don't learn about it? A lot. In this, the first in a three-part series on Reconstruction, we speak to Mimi Eisen of the Zinn Education Project about America’s first Civil Rights Era and why most of us don’t know enough - or anything at all - about it. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of Civics 101 was made possible in part by a contribution in memory of Martin
0:07.4	Leslie Schneider.
0:11.4	I'm Hannah McCarthy.
0:12.4	I'm Nick Capity-J.
0:13.4	And we're just going to get straight to it.
0:16.3	Nick, I have wanted to talk about reconstruction for a long time on this show.
0:20.8	I just didn't entirely know how.
0:23.8	It's a term that we used to talk about an era of American history, a period following
0:29.2	America's Civil War, a period when formerly enslaved people were ostensibly freed from
0:36.1	bondage and also ostensibly free to exercise their rights.
0:40.7	It's a term we used to talk about constitutional amendments that are often pointed to as
0:45.1	fundamentally changing human rights in America.
0:49.4	It's also a period that we do not talk about.
0:59.2	Reconstruction is one of the most consequential and instructive errors of US history and also
1:09.3	among the most suppressed in K through 12 education and in public memory.
1:14.4	This is Mimi Eisen.
1:15.4	I'm a historian and program manager for the Zen education project and co-author of our
1:22.2	report on teaching reconstruction, erasing the black freedom struggle, how state standards
1:26.9	fail to teach the truth about reconstruction.
1:29.3	Okay, so if we're going to talk about what we don't talk about and why, I think the first
1:33.5	step should be to establish in very broad terms what reconstruction is.
1:39.8	It was this time during and after the Civil War with the emancipation of 4 million enslaved
	...

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