Google “Reconstruction,” and you will see that this “turbulent era following the Civil War” was an “effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people” into the U.S. According to Wikipedia, this “chapter in the history of civil rights in the United States” “lasted from 1865 to 1877.” But what if Reconstruction started not with the Civil War, but with the Revolution? What if the U.S. has from the beginning been defined by the need to reconstruct the nation in the aftermath of slavery, emancipation, and abolition? And, in a year that began with the Confederate battle flag waving in the U.S. Capitol, who is to say that Reconstruction ever ended? Spanning from the “first Reconstruction” in the post-Revolutionary northeast to the present, this course examines what critic Cody Marrs has called “the boundarylessness of Reconstruction.””