Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence

Examines Reconstruction (conventionally, 1863-1877, and often called the first civil rights revolution in the United States), and the political violence used to combat it. The course places the events of this period in the broader American history of civil rights and the American penchant for political violence, with particular attention to antebellum mobbing, the Civil War, and Jim Crow lynching, but also looking at other forms of political violence such as Native American dispossession and labor unrest.