History Curriculum/Book 20

Book twenty of the curriculum

The History of the Reconstruction Era

The twentieth book in the curriculum and the second of the Late American History set. Seventeen chapters across four weeks — from the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, the death of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson's plan for the South; through the Reconstruction Acts, the Freedmen's Bureau, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the first Black members of Congress and the impeachment of a president; then the Black Codes and sharecropping, the Ku Klux Klan and the laws and trials against it, women's petitions, Southern industry and the Supreme Court's narrowing of the new amendments; and last the disputed election of 1876, the end of federal Reconstruction in 1877, the laws of separation, and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. TWO THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU START. First, the first-person accounts in both printed editions are HISTORICAL FICTION — written to tell the story, informed by the surviving record, and not the words of the people named. The narrators are real people, but some speak of things that happened after they died, and some meet in scenes that never took place. The record itself is very large: the laws and amendments, the presidents' messages and vetoes, the Congressional Globe, the Freedmen's Bureau records, the sworn testimony of 1871–72, the Supreme Court's opinions and dissents, the newspapers of the day, and the letters, speeches and memoirs of the people who lived it — and this course quotes them. Second, at the back of the Ultimate Guide, after the chapters (pages 331–366), there are Cross-Curricular sections — Math, Science, Health, Social Studies and English — and comprehension questions with answer keys, to use alongside this course. They are not a fifth week and there is nothing to hand in for them.