American Civil War & Reconstruction: Links about Reconstruction

MOOC. Columbia U. 74 videos (less than 15 minutes each) Learn about the political, social, and economic changes in the Union and the Confederacy and the Civil War’s long-term economic and intellectual impact.

Between 1865 and 1877, several plans were developed by which the Confederate states could be readmitted to the Union and the residents of the states given full citizenship rights. It was far from clear, however, which plan would do a better job maintaining the social peace and protecting African Americans’ ability to earn a wage, raise a family, own land, and exercise the right to vote. In this lecture, Professor Holloway outlines the contours of the Ten Percent Plan, Presidential Reconstruction, and Radical Reconstruction, and he explains how these plans embraced a variety of approaches to reuniting the disparate states. As Professor Holloway explains, Reconstruction greatly enhanced the rights of African Americans, while also circumscribing their lives by new political, economic, and social initiatives.

The exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.

Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention
Journals of Congress
Debates of Congress
Statutes and Documents

Documenting the American South, UNC Chapel Hill

Freedmen and Southern Society Project. Read selected documents from this Volume.

Harper's Weekly Reports on Black America, 1857-1874

Primary sources covering the antebellum through reconstruction periods of US History.

Documenting the American South, UNC.

Fordham University Internet History Sourcebooks

National Geographic Society. During the era of slavery, the Underground Railroad was a network of routes, places, and people that helped enslaved people in the American South escape to the North.

National Endowment for the Humanities. Trace the fall of slavery during the Civil War with this interactive online map of emancipation.

United States Geographical Society. 35 pages

United States Geographical Society, 30 pages