The Second American Revolution: An Evening with the Curator

On the 250th of the founding of the American republic and the anniversary of the Thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, you’re invited to join acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha PhD, for a special program that will show how emancipation during the Civil War constituted a Second American Revolution and how Abraham Lincoln became the first American President to publicly endorse black citizenship, the cornerstone of Reconstruction after the war, before his death. The Reconstruction constitutional amendments remade the American republic establishing national citizenship by birthright or naturalization and establishing black male voting. However, a long campaign of racist domestic terror in the south and reactionary decisions by the Supreme Court at the end of the nineteenth century would undo the gains of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The history of emancipation shows us that citizenship rights and American democracy itself was overthrown for a long period in the postwar south until the Civil Rights movement in the twentieth century finally implemented Reconstruction era constitutional amendments.
This program will take place on Thursday, December 3, 2026, in the ALPLM Union Theater. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Program begins at 6:30 p.m. This program is free to attend but advance registration is required.
A book signing with Manisha Sinha will follow the discussion. You’ll have an opportunity to purchase her book, “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920,” and have it signed. You may also purchase a book in advance of the program when you register online, and it will be held for you.
Audience members will also be able to visit the special exhibit curated by Manisha Sinha, “The Second American Revolution,” which examines the war’s aftermath, the attempts to give African Americans an equal role in the South and the successful movement to reverse most of those gains for the next century. The exhibit includes the pen Abraham Lincoln used when signing the Emancipation Proclamation, artifacts from racial terror groups and short films explaining the forces that reversed Reconstruction.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the Past President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellowship in 2022. She taught at the University of Massachusetts for over twenty years where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico and cited in The New York Times 1619 Project. Her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, which won the Frederick Douglass, the Organization of American Historians’ Avery Craven, the Southern Historical Association’s biannual James Rawley, and SHEAR Best Book prizes, was also long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. It was widely reviewed and named editor’s choice in The New York Times Book Review and the book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication. The Chinese edition of the book, translated by Professor Li Dan of Nanjing University, was published by the Beijing Han Tang Zhi Dao Book Distribution Co., Ltd. in 2025. She is the author and editor of several other books and articles. Her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 was published by Liveright (Norton) and reviewed by The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Republic among other outlets. It won the biennial President’s Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era in 2026.