Professor David Blight examines the Reconstruction era in this Yale lecture, tracing its many forms and the political conflict between President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans in Congress. The lecture opens with the line Beware the people weeping, when they bear the iron hand, framing a discussion of how the postwar settlement was contested from its earliest days. Recorded in Yale's Battell Chapel as part of the DeVane Lecture series America at 250: A History, the class is part of a one time course surveying United States history from 1776 to the present across lectures by three Yale historians, following the previous class's treatment of Union victory and emancipation.