The Reconstruction Era

As partners for National History Day, EDSITEment and the Smithsonian Learning Lab collaborate to create collections for student projects related to the annual theme. The Breaking Barriers in History: Reconstruction Era collection includes primary sources to learn more about the Freedman's Bureau, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, President Andrew Johnson, the first African Americans elected to the U.S. Congress, and more. 

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Learning Lab Collection for Reconstruction.

EDSITEment and Smithsonian Learning Lab

In addition to the Learning Lab collections, the partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities with the Library of Congress to produce Chronicling America means students and teachers have access to millions of searchable pages from digitized newspapers dating back to the 17th century. Below are collections of newspapers related to the Civil War and Reconstruction Era:  

• Harper’s Ferry
• Fugitive Slave Laws
• Civil War Secession
• Emancipation Proclamation

The National Endowment for the Humanities funds a wide array of digital media projects, including documentaries, podcasts, films, and interactive games. Projects related to the Reconstruction Era are provided below:

Visualizing Reconstruction—couples data regarding the end of slavery and the Civil War with digital mapping. 

Colored Conventions—From 1830 until the 1890s, already free and once captive Black people came together in state and national political meetings called "Colored Conventions." This NEH funded project has made it possible for teachers, students, and the public to access records and more through a digital archive. 

Slavery by Another Name—a 90-minute documentary that challenges a long held assumption: the belief that slavery in United States ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Contested Landscape: The Battle Over Confederate Monuments—This episode of BackStory includes discussion of when and why many of the nation’s Confederate statues were erected and what they stood for. 

A More Perfect Union: The Reconstruction Era—This episode of BackStory examines when Congress passed the first Reconstruction Acts, paving the way for Confederate states to rejoin the Union after the war.  

Radio Diaries: Civil War Widows—This podcast tells the story of Daisy Anderson and Alberta Martin, two women who, when they were in their early twenties, married men who were near 80 and, as it happens, served on opposite sides of the Civil War.

The resources below are drawn from newspapers available through Chronicling America and offer opposing viewpoints on the goals of Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War. Students can use these materials to participate in a discussion about the start of Reconstruction, as a catalyst for further inquiry into how states and individuals responded to Reconstruction, and as research for a project of their own design on whether Reconstruction helped the United States to form "a more perfect union" following the end of the Civil War. 

The Daily Confederate, January 31, 1865 (North Carolina)—“The beauty of the prospect, is not what entices them to rush on, to what we believe will be our certain destruction: and this is sufficiently evident, not only from the unanimity with which they agreed, to the beginning, that a separation once effected, should be final and eternal--not only from the very dark picture, which even the most superficial view of the consequences of reconstruction, presents--but alas from their own statement that they prefer reconstruction by consent, as the alternative to subjugation, which to them seems, to be inevitable."

Daily Ohio Statesman, June 23, 1865 (Ohio)—“We fear President Johnson is too fast. Treason has not been made odious! The work of reconstruction has been commenced before any leading traitor has been punished.”

The Louisiana Democrat, April 4, 1866 (Louisiana)—“Is there in all history, a parallel to the “Reconstruction Committee?”

The Daily Gate City, May 15, 1866 (Iowa)—“Of what value would freedom be to the negro if he had not the right to maintain himself, honorably, either as a farmer or mechanic, or by engaging in some business?”

Brownlow's Knoxville Whig, September 4, 1867 (Tennessee)—“Freedom of speech and of the press, education, equality before the law and in political rights and privileges are the essentials of any satisfactory reconstruction in the South.”

The Lincoln County Herald, November 28, 1867 (Missouri)—“The arrest of Maj. McCardle, the distinguished and chivalric editor of the Times took place yesterday. On inquiry we learned that he had been arrested for obstructing reconstruction and advising resistance to the acts of Congress. This is a poor pretense.”

Design interdisciplinary activities that incorporate literature and poetry written during the Reconstruction Era with resources and databases provided below. 

The Charles Chestnutt Digital Archive—includes Chestnutt’s poetry, essays, a digital version of his novel, and a collection of short stories.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—a prolific writer who published multiple collections of poetry from 1845 through the 1890s.

Harper’s Weekly, January 14, 1865, “A Soldier’s Dream” (poem, p. 26).

“To dream of the loved ones far away,
Or hear in the wind the shell’s wild scream.”

Reconstruction Era Literature (New York Public Library) 

Reconstruction in Young Adult & Middle Grade Fiction

Robert S. Levine's "Frederick Douglass Once Turned to Fiction to Describe What He Considered True Heroism: The story behind Douglass‘s only novella." HUMANITIES, Spring 2018, Volume 39, Number 2.

Design activities that incorporate music composed during the Reconstruction Era with resources and databases provided below. 

• Music of the Civil War and Reconstruction

Oh, freedom over me!
And before I'd be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free.

• Rhiannon Giddens and Dirk Powell Explore Reconstruction Era Music
• African American Sheet Music
• Digital History: Civil War and Reconstruction