Professor David Blight examines the unraveling of Reconstruction in this Yale DeVane Lecture, covering the period from 1870 to 1877 and its long aftermath. The lecture opens with the presidential election of 1868, the first held after the Civil War and the first in which formerly enslaved men could vote, and traces how the political gains of Reconstruction were progressively rolled back over the following decade. Recorded as part of the America at 250: A History course, a one time survey of United States history from 1776 to the present taught by three Yale historians, the class follows directly from the prior lecture on the conflict between Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans.