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American History Mondays with Dr. Richard Bell: Reconstruction Era
In this, the final Conversation in this series, we’ll look at how Americans tried to heal the wounds of the Civil War in a series of reforms enacted between 1865 and 1877 known as Reconstruction. To accomplish this great leap forward, they rewrote dozens of laws and thrice amended the Constitution of the United States to guarantee the extension of the full rights of citizenship to African Americans. And it wasn’t just Black political participation that flourished during Reconstruction—so too did Black schools, Black churches, and various other Black-led institutions. We’ll spend today examining these dozen hopeful years and conclude by looking at how and why most of these leaps forward were swept away in the mid-1870s, only a decade after the end of the war – leaving unfinished business.
Dr. Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and has won more than a dozen teaching awards, including the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar Award. Professor Bell is author of the new book "Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home," which was shortlisted for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize.
This conversation is suitable for all ages.
90 minutes, including a 30 minute Q&A.
We tend to forget the failure of Reconstruction all too easily; this talk went a good way toward correcting that.
This seminar was the last in a series of 26 consecutive Monday seminars on American History by Dr. Bell. This review is about the entire series. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I will never forget and that I wish was still ongoing! Being able to spend 26 Monday afternoons learning about early American history through Reconstruction in chronological order with a presenter as brilliant as Dr. Bell was an absolutely privilege as well as a fantastic learning process. He can't be beat with his combination of erudition, passion, sense of humor, warmth, and eloquence. Every one of the 26 seminars had me fully engaged, and each time I walked away with something deeply important about American history that helped me understand my world better. I can't thank him enough for devoting 26 Mondays to this endeavor. It was also great fun because he makes it fun!
The finale to a wonderful series of lectures by Dr Bell My Mondays will not be the same