Reconstruction I: Secession on Trial

June 8, 1191. The Crusaders and Muslim forces are locked in battle over the city of Acre. On one side is Saladin, the great Muslim leader who has already recaptured Jerusalem. On the other, an armada arrives carrying England’s king: Richard the Lionheart.The Crusades will become ...  Show more

June 6, 1944. As thousands of Allied soldiers prepare to storm the beaches of Normandy, they climb down rope nets into small wooden landing craft bobbing in the dark waters of the English Channel. Within hours, these boats will carry them into the largest amphibious invasion in h ...  Show more

The Ku Klux Klan was arguably America’s first organized terrorist movement. It was a paramilitary unit that arose in the South during the early years of Reconstruction. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them lan ...  Show more

One question has plagued our nation since its founding: will Black people in America ever experience full citizenship?  

In searching for an answer, Into America is collaborating with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of A ...

What if the Civil War had ended differently, with the South seceding from the Union? Would slavery have continued? Would the southern states have continued as a whole? Would any other states have followed suit?

To explore this hypothetical history, Don spoke to Aaron ...

In the spring of 1865, the United States celebrated the end of four years of Civil War. As American soldiers laid down their weapons, four million formerly enslaved Black people in the South grappled with the daunting task of building new lives as free citizens in a nation sti ...