About this item
A groundbreaking, expansive new account of Reconstruction that fundamentally alters our view of this formative period in American history. We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant South. That effort failed -- and that failure serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality.. In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in 1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the "corrupt bargain" of 1877 put Rutherford B.
About the Author
Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. Her claim to fame: she appeared on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show in 2014. Her book The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015. She has written for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, and has been interviewed by The Times of London, The Boston Globe, and Slate. She was an adviser and on-screen expert for the Emmy nominated PBS documentary, The Abolitionists, which is a part of the NEH funded Created Equal film series. She received the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award as well as the Chancellor's Medal, the highest faculty honor, from the University of Massachusetts, where she taught for over twenty years.
