Reconstruction 
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SOURCE: Washington Post
11/12/2021
Impeachment May Not Work. Here’s the Next Best Way to Dump Trump
by Eric Foner
The 14th Amendment empowers Congress to bar persons involved in insurrection against the United States from holding office. This can't remove Trump, but it can stop him (and anyone found to have plotted the Capitol rioting) from returning to office.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
1/13/2021
Learning from the Failure of Reconstruction
Isaac Chotiner interviews Eric Foner on the echoes of Reconstruction-era political violence in last week's Capitol riots.
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SOURCE: Reckon South
1/12/2021
Was the attack on Congress un-American? Yes and no, historians say
Historians John Giggie and Manisha Sinha weigh in on how the Capitol riots do and don't reflect patterns of violence in American history.
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1/10/2021
Historical Rhetoric Resurfaced in Georgia's Runoff Election
by Alicia K. Jackson
Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock didn't just defeat their Republican opponents on January 5, they defeated a number of racist tropes that have characterized Georgia politics since Reconstruction.
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SOURCE: The Nation
1/8/2020
The Capitol Riot Reveals the Dangers From the Enemy Within
by Eric Foner
Let’s not assume that until the Capitol riot the United States was a well-functioning democracy.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/8/2020
1871 Provides a Road Map for Addressing the Pro-Trump Attempted Insurrection
by Megan Kate Nelson
"The actions that the federal government took in 1871 signaled its willingness to defend the constitutional rights of the nation’s citizens, Black and White, and to protect them against violence."
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SOURCE: Democracy Now!
1/7/2020
Historian: White Terrorist Groups Attacked Democracy During Reconstruction, They Are Doing It Again
Historian Manisha Sinha discusses the antecedents of Wednesday's mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol, incited by Donald Trump during the certification of the electoral college victory of Joe Biden.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
1/5/2020
Josh Hawley Dodges Question During Fox News Grilling on Election Challenge
Senator Josh Hawley's demands that Congress intervene in the electoral vote certification depends on ignoring that A: Congress formed such a commission in 1877 after three states failed to certify their vote and B: the resulting compromise forfeited the politial and civil rights of Black Americans.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
11/24/2020
The Ugliest Presidential Election in History: Fraud, Voter Intimidation and a Backroom Deal
Any comparison between the disputed election of 1876 and today must put the role of racist terrorism against black voters by figures like South Carolina's "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman at the center of analysis, contents Ronald G. Shafer.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
11/9/2020
An American Pogrom (Review)
by David W. Blight
David W. Blight reviews a new book on the 1898 Wilmington massacre and the violent overthrow of multiracial democracy in North Carolina.
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SOURCE: CBS News
10/25/2020
Voter Fraud, Suppression and Partisanship: A Look at the 1876 Election
As the United States celebrated the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, a heated competition between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden was rife with accusations of voter fraud and suppression.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/24/2020
How to Steal an Election
by Jon Grinspan
Many of our election rules date from that moment, around 1900, when Americans redirected their “love of smart dealings” toward tightening up electoral systems, rather than finding ways around them.
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SOURCE: Perspectives on History
10/19/2020
“If Anybody Says Election to Me, I Want to Fight”: The Messy Election of 1876
by Jon Grinspan
The election of 1876 was a disaster for American democracy.
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SOURCE: The Nation
10/6/2020
The Oligarchs’ Revenge (Review)
by Manisha Sinha
Heather Cox Richardson's book makes an essential argument that the conceptual distinction between class and race in American history obscures the way that American elites have worked to create and defend oligarchy.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
9/24/2020
The Origins of Policing in America
Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Media Studies scholar Chenjerai Kumanyika explain how American policing grew out of efforts to control the labor of poor and enslaved people.
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SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
9/11/2020
The Election from Our Past that Blares a Warning for 2020
by Richard Kreitner
The election of 1876 threatened to return the country to civil war. The compromise that prevented that outcome may have been worse.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
9/6/2020
Our Long, Forgotten History of Election-Related Violence
by Jelani Cobb
A weather forecast is not a prediction of the inevitable. We are not doomed to witness a catastrophic tempest this fall, but anyone who is paying attention knows that the winds have begun to pick up.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
9/8/2020
For the First Time, America May Have an Anti-Racist Majority
by Adam Serwer
Atlantic writer Adam Serwer argues that people who want to understand this year should look not to 1968, but to 1868, when a moment of potential for establishing interracial democracy through government intervention seemed possible.
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9/6/2020
Americans Have Feared Another Civil War Since the End of the Last One
by Richard Kreitner
The ink was hardly dry on Lee's surrender at Appomattox before Andrew Johnson's conciliation toward the former Confederacy clashed with the unfulfilled goals of freed slaves and radical Republicans to threaten further violence. These fault lines have been hidden but never healed in the restored American union.
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/28/2020
The Massacre That Emboldened White Supremacists
by William Briggs and Jon Krakauer
The Colfax Massacre, sparked by white supremacists' refusal to accept a state election result, set in motion a series of legal rulings that made it virtually impossible for the federal government to prosecute civil rights violations by private citizens, ensuring that mob violence and racial oppression would continue.
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