About

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A 44-page PDF of the report can be downloaded for free below. It includes the full main narrative, resources, and three sample state assessments.

Advisors

The Teach Reconstruction campaign advisors provided substantive feedback.

Shawn Leigh Alexander is a professor and the chairperson of African and African American Studies and the director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas. Alexander is the author of An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP, and editor of Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings.

Derek W. Black is a professor of law and the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy.

David Blight is a professor of history at Yale University and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. Blight is the author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

Greg E. Carr is an associate professor of Africana Studies, the chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, and an adjunct professor at the Howard School of Law. Carr is a co-founder of the Philadelphia Freedom Schools Movement.

Michael Charney is a retired public school social studies teacher with over 30 years of experience in education, labor organizing, and education policy. He provides strategic guidance and support for the Teach Reconstruction campaign. Read more.

Gregory P. Downs is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Downs is also a co-author of the National Parks Service’s theme study, The Era of Reconstruction, 1861–1900.

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman NEH Professor of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. Downs is the author of several books including Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation, which he co-edited with David Blight.

Hilary N. Green is a professor of history, Africana Studies Department, at Davidson College. Green is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890.

Steven Hahn is a professor of history at New York University and the author of A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.

William Loren Katz was the author of numerous books on U.S. history for middle and high school students, including An Album of Reconstruction. (In Memoriam.)

Chenjerai Kumanyika is a researcher, journalist, artist, and assistant professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Journalism and Media Studies. He is also the co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War.

James Loewen was a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont and the author of several books including Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause”. (In Memoriam.)

Kate Masur is a professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction and An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C. Masur is also the co-author of the National Parks Service’s theme study, The Era of Reconstruction, 1861–1900.

Jeremy Nesoff is the associate program director for Facing History’s Leadership Academy. Among his roles is leading work connected to the curriculum unit The Reconstruction Era and The Fragility of Democracy.

Paul Ortiz is the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Ortiz is the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing & White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 and An African American and Latinx History of the United States.

Tyler Parry is an assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of “Black Radicalism and the ‘Tuition-Free’ University,” an article exploring the profound impact South Carolina’s majority Black Reconstruction era legislature had on public education.

Tiffany Mitchell Patterson is a manager of social studies at District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). Prior to joining the central services social studies team at DCPS, she served as an assistant professor of secondary social studies at West Virginia University. She taught middle school social studies for 10 years in Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia.

David Roediger is the foundation distinguished professor at the University of Kansas. He is the author of several books on race and class in the U.S. including Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All.

Mark Roudané is a retired early childhood teacher. He curates the digital archive of his great, great grandfather, Charles Roudanez, who founded the New Orleans Daily Tribune, the first daily Black newspaper during Reconstruction.

Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina and The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.

Stephen West is an associate professor of history at the Catholic University of America. West is the author of From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915 and co-editor of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 3, volume 2, Land and Labor, 1866–1867.

Kidada E. Williams is an associate professor of history at Wayne State University. Williams is the author of They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I and the producer and host of Seizing Freedom, VPM's podcast on Black people's quest for liberation, progress, and joy in the United States.

Design

This microsite for the report was designed by Teaching for Change creative coordinator Mykella Palmer-McCalla. The outreach materials were designed by Pyramid Communications.