Respectively, these three amendments are responsible for the abolition of slavery, the guarantee of birthright citizenship and due process of the law, and the prohibition of denying the right to vote based on race. Foner focuses his attention on the debates behind and significance of the passage of the three Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th. The Second Founding is exactly the right book to inspire a move towards a new appreciation of the Reconstruction Era as Foner wrote it with a mass audience in mind. This is where Eric Foner’s recently published book, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, can help reorient our understanding of the period. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage to comments made by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign). Even though dissenting scholars have discredited this bigoted school of thought, it has continued to thoroughly dominate popular discourse in the past century (from Birth of a Nation and President John F. Central to this interpretation was the racist insistence that the enfranchisement of African Americans led to corruption and misgovernment throughout the former Confederate states. The dominant narrative of the Dunning School-a group of scholars who critiqued the project of Reconstruction-was central to the idea of the South’s “ Lost Cause,” and laid the rhetorical foundation for decades of Jim Crow laws. The lack of focus on the Reconstruction Era is one result of over a hundred years of students of American history being taught to scorn the “excesses” of its policies. But this second founding has also left a complicated legacy littered with devastating reversals of justice that demand our continued attention today. marked by the greatest expansion of constitutional rights since the document’s ratification.

For historian Eric Foner, the Reconstruction Era was nothing less than a second founding of the U.S. Yet for all the attention paid to the war itself, the Reconstruction Era is almost treated as an afterthought. Wars are dramatic events-deadly ruptures that invariably bring changes to political and social orders-and therefore attract a lot of scholarly and amateur interest. The Civil War is ubiquitous in media depictions of that century and generations of students have learned to recognize the significance of Fort Sumter, Gettysburg, and Appomattox. If you were asked to name the defining moment of American history in the 19th century, more likely than not, your answer would be “The American Civil War.” This is an understandable response.

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