In this episode of the America at 250 podcast, Professor Beverly Gage asks Professor David Blight to expand on his recent DeVane Lecture installments covering Reconstruction and the many challenges the postwar settlement faced. The conversation revisits themes from Blight's lectures on the defeat of Reconstruction between 1870 and 1877 and the Gilded Age that followed, offering a more discursive discussion than the formal classroom setting allows. Part of the companion podcast series to Yale's America at 250: A History course, the episode is aimed at listeners following the full DeVane Lecture series on United States history from 1776 to the present, taught by three Yale historians.