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. The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is a sweeping narrative that remakes our understanding of perhaps the most important period in American history and 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.
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Copies of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic are available for purchase through the Mark Twain Store; proceeds benefit The Mark Twain House & Museum. Books will be shipped after the event. We regret that we are NOT able to ship books outside the United States as it is cost-prohibitive to do so. _____________________________________________________________
About the Author:
Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. Her last book, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize among several others and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction.
About the Moderator:
Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, and Associate Dean for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of award-winning books on African American history, including The Sword and the Shield and Stokely: A Life.
