{"podcast":{"title":"Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise","slug":"reconstruction-the-unfinished-promise-7826212","podcast_index_feed_id":7826212,"rss_url":"https://rss.art19.com/reconstruction-the-unfinished-promise","website_url":"https://art19.com/shows/reconstruction-the-unfinished-promise","image_url":"https://content.production.cdn.art19.com/images/cf/3b/81/49/cf3b8149-1c21-49b6-9e2a-a444c440d892/c8aa9008431c9319bf3eb67bdfcc33032adeaddf3f3853d7c5b3b656e42096d2cca36a90fddd0ef410aa075a6aada8993ea5a6d925f9d9d99d5bdf0a054bc762.jpeg","author":"Higher Ground Audio","episode_count":10,"summary":"Reconstruction begins where, for most Americans, the story of the Civil War ends: The North is victorious and slavery is abolished. But what happened next was one of the most important decades in American history, a moment when our country grappled with its original sin and imagined — and briefly enacted — a more perfect union. Drawing from archives, letters, diaries, court records, eyewitness testimonies and some of America’s most accomplished scholars and storytellers, Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise explores this unprecedented historical moment in rich, kaleidoscopic detail. The series unpacks a time when a determined band of reformers attempted to radically reimagine American society — from the Constitution to the roots of its economy to the very nature of citizenship itself. Reconstruction was a time when Americans struggled over fundamental questions about our country. Who gets to be a citizen? Who has the right to vote? Who can own property? In short, who belongs? Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise explores what America might have looked like if Reconstruction had truly succeeded, and how the ultimate backlash to Reconstruction prevented our country from becoming…","last_synced_at":"2026-07-16T16:17:04.390501+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/reconstruction-the-unfinished-promise-7826212"},"episode":{"title":"A History of Democracy, Revised","slug":"a-history-of-democracy-revised","published_at":"2026-07-09T07:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/reconstruction-the-unfinished-promise-7826212/a-history-of-democracy-revised","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/reconstruction-the-unfinished-promise-7826212","url":"https://clrtpod.com/m/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/1334/rss.art19.com/episodes/bf292fcc-7055-428a-ac91-95730c166ca9.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg90cmFuc2NyaWJyBjoGRVQ%3D--952c5701c84ad333c69d5faa668f8177091704f0","audio_url":"https://clrtpod.com/m/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/1334/rss.art19.com/episodes/bf292fcc-7055-428a-ac91-95730c166ca9.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg90cmFuc2NyaWJyBjoGRVQ%3D--952c5701c84ad333c69d5faa668f8177091704f0","summary":"Soon after Reconstruction began to wind down, American historians wrote the era off as a failure. But that narrative didn’t emerge by accident — it was engineered by a celebrated historian named William Dunning, whose denigration of Black civil rights dominated textbooks for decades. Journalist Jelani Cobb reveals why the “Dunning School” remained dominant until the 1930s, when scholars including W.E.B Du Bois and Eric Foner fought to restore Reconstruction’s legacy in the narrative of American history. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .","meta_description":"Soon after Reconstruction began to wind down, American historians wrote the era off as a failure. But that narrative didn’t emerge by accident — it was en…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1710,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/reconstruction-the-unfinished-promise-7826212/episodes/a-history-of-democracy-revised/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/reconstruction-the-unfinished-promise-7826212/a-history-of-democracy-revised.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}