Yale historian David Blight delivers this installment of his DeVane Lecture Series course on slavery and its legacies in American history, focusing on the Reconstruction era after Lincoln's assassination. He examines Andrew Johnson's presidency, his clashes with Radical Republicans in Congress, and how their fight over readmitting the South and securing rights for freed people amounted to what Blight frames as a second American revolution. The lecture traces the political and constitutional stakes of the period, including impeachment battles and the push for constitutional amendments, situating them within the course's broader argument that the endings of slavery never fully resolved its legacies. Blight lectures in his familiar narrative style, weaving primary sources and political detail into an account of how Reconstruction's promises and failures shaped the trajectory of American democracy.