Reconstruction may be one of the most misunderstood eras in American history. Versions of the era like the early motion picture Birth of a Nation (1915) and the novel Gone With the Wind (1936 ...

Of course, like in all eras of American political history, Americans are also during the early Reconstruction years responding to events. For example, in 1866, only a year after the war had ended ...

Smalls may not be a household name, but he was a key figure in one of the most formative and poorly understood eras in American history, the short period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction.