Manisha Sinha The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920

About the author:

Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the president-elect of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Born in India, she received her PhD from Columbia University, where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery by Politico and recently featured in the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Her second monograph, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, was long-listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

About the book:

In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920, 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. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the fall of the last Southern Reconstruction state governments. Sinha’s startlingly original account opens in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln that triggered the secession of the Deep South states and takes us all the way to 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote—and which Sinha calls the “last Reconstruction amendment.”

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