Yale historian Jonathan Holloway lays out the competing plans for reunifying the country after the Civil War, from Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan through Presidential Reconstruction to the Radical Reconstruction pushed by Congress after 1866. Speaking as part of his course American History: From Emancipation to the Present, Holloway traces the chronology from 1865 to 1877 and then works through a fuller narrative of the period, showing how each approach handled the readmission of the former Confederate states and the status of the newly freed population. He details the Black Codes passed across the South in 1865 to restrict Black labor and movement, the rise of sharecropping as a replacement for slave labor, and the work of the Freedmen's Bureau in providing food, schooling, and legal support. The lecture's throughline is a tension it keeps returning to: Reconstruction expanded Black Americans' legal and political rights while simultaneously building new economic and social structures that constrained how those rights could actually be exercised.