This episode of Civics 101 was made possible in part by a contribution in memory of Martin

Leslie Schneider.

I'm Hannah McCarthy.

I'm Nick Capity-J.

And we're just going to get straight to it.

Nick, I have wanted to talk about reconstruction for a long time on this show.

I just didn't entirely know how.

It's a term that we used to talk about an era of American history, a period following

America's Civil War, a period when formerly enslaved people were ostensibly freed from

bondage and also ostensibly free to exercise their rights.

It's a term we used to talk about constitutional amendments that are often pointed to as

fundamentally changing human rights in America.

It's also a period that we do not talk about.

Reconstruction is one of the most consequential and instructive errors of US history and also

among the most suppressed in K through 12 education and in public memory.

This is Mimi Eisen.

I'm a historian and program manager for the Zen education project and co-author of our

report on teaching reconstruction, erasing the black freedom struggle, how state standards

fail to teach the truth about reconstruction.

Okay, so if we're going to talk about what we don't talk about and why, I think the first

step should be to establish in very broad terms what reconstruction is.

It was this time during and after the Civil War with the emancipation of 4 million enslaved

...