Reconstruction

Shannon brings James Garfield's brief presidency to the screen in a new Netflix series. And in the film Nuremberg, Shannon plays a prosecutor trying Nazi leaders for war crimes.

Gates says white supremacy was born in the years after the Civil War, as white Southerners looked for ways to roll back the newly acquired rights of African-Americans. His new book is Stony the Road.

In his book, which has just won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, Keith Lowe describes a land with no governments, schools, banks or shops, where rape was rampant and women prostituted themselves for food. Flying in the face of usual post-WWII narratives, Lowe sheds light on a complex history.

In the period after the Civil War, former slaves were made promises of equality and citizenship by the federal government. Historian Eric Foner analyzes the fate of those promises in Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. He has published numerous works on the American Reconstruction after the civil war, a period whose problems with promoting racial and economic justice in a diverse country remain relevant to America today.