If you Google “Reconstruction,” you will see on history.com that this “turbulent era following the Civil War” represented an “effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States.” According to Wikipedia, this “significant 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 American Revolution? What if the U.S. has, from the beginning, been defined by the effort to reconstruct the nation in the aftermath of slavery, emancipation, and abolition?