David Blight, Yale's Sterling Professor of History, delivers this session of the 2024 DeVane Lecture Series course on slavery and its legacies in American life. This class covers the retreat from Reconstruction under the Grant administration, tracing how federal will to protect Black civil rights eroded through the 1870s. Blight walks through the political and constitutional maneuvers that opened the path to so called Southern Redemption, when former Confederate states reasserted white control through violence, fraud, and new legal structures. The lecture sits within a course examining slavery's imprint on the Constitution, the Civil War, and the political and economic order that followed. Blight draws on the era's key episodes, including contested elections and paramilitary violence like that of the White League and Red Shirts, to explain how Reconstruction's gains were dismantled within a decade. Filmed as part of Yale's DeVane Lecture Series for a general audience.