Red Emma’s

We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant South. That effort failed—and that failure serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality. In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, 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 take 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." Within this grand frame, Sinha narrates the rise and fall of what she calls the "Second American Republic." The Reconstruction of the South, a process driven by the alliance between the formerly enslaved at the grassroots and Radical Republicans in Congress, is central to her story, but only part of it. As she demonstrates, the US Army’s conquest of Indigenous nations in the West, labor conflict in the North, Chinese exclusion, women’s suffrage, and the establishment of an overseas American empire were all part of the same struggle between the forces of democracy and those of reaction. The main concern of Reconstruction was the plight of the formerly enslaved, but its fall affected other groups as well: women, workers, immigrants, and Native Americans. From the election of black legislators across the South in the late 1860s to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the colonial war in the Philippines in the 1890s, Sinha narrates the major episodes of the era and introduces us to key individuals, famous and otherwise, who helped remake American democracy, or whose actions spelled its doom. A sweeping narrative that remakes our understanding of perhaps the most consequential period in American history, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic shows how the great contest of that age is also the great contest of our age—and serves as a necessary reminder of how young and fragile our democracy truly is.

Manisha Sinha’s magnificent account of Reconstruction fleshes out and vastly expands what W.E.B. Du Bois dubbed ‘abolition democracy.’ The Second Republic was never merely a southern project but a national struggle with global implications. Reconstruction’s defeat ensured Jim Crow’s ascent as the law of the land and the ideology of colonial expansion. The January 6 insurrection is a consequence of this defeat, which will become crystal-clear to anyone who reads this book. —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. She was born in India and received her Ph.D 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 in Politico and recently featured in The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Her multiple award winning second monograph The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction. It was named Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review, book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication, and one of three great History books of 2016 in Bloomberg News. She is a member of the Historian Advisory Council of the American Civil War Museum, Richmond, and of the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library. She sits on the Council of the American Antiquarian Society and the Board of Trustees of the Connecticut Historical Society. She is co-editor of the Race in the Atlantic Series of the University of Georgia Press and is on the editorial board of the journal Slavery and Abolition. She taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for over twenty years, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest recognition bestowed on faculty.

Karsonya “Kaye” Wise Whitehead is the founding executive director of The Karson Institute for Race, Peace & Social Justice and a professor of communication and African and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland. She is the host of the award-winning radio show Today with Dr. Kaye on WEAA, 88.9 FM and the recent recipient of the Vernon Jarrett Medal for Journalistic Excellence, for her outstanding reporting on the impact racial reckoning has had in helping to close social/racial wealth gap for Black people in America. She is the author of four books, including RaceBrave: new and selected works; Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis, which received both the 2015 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians and the 2014 Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians; and Letters to My Black Sons: Raising Boys in a Post-Racial America. She is a K-12 master teacher in African American history; an award-winning curriculum writer and lesson plan developer; and an award-winning former Baltimore City middle school teacher.