This unit allows students to examine Reconstruction from different perspectives. Students analyze Reconstruction not only from the eyes of politicians and the law, but also from the viewpoints of migrating African Americans, the growing women’s suffrage movement, workers for the Freedmen’s Bureau, Chinese labor imported to the American South and Northeast, and finally through the eyes of southern resisters and the Ku Klux Klan. In addition, students place Reconstruction within the broader framework of the requirements of an emerging industrial economy and a geographically and demographically growing nation.

Academic activities include categorizing quotations from primary sources, analyzing speeches for attitudes regarding Reconstruction, developing historical arguments, creating public opinion polls, developing editorials, conducting interviews, evaluating photographs and poems, developing a court case, analyzing political cartoons, and comparing primary and secondary sources.