Yale historian David Blight continues his DeVane Lecture Series course on slavery, the Civil War, and their aftermath in American life. This session is part of a sequence built around the question of whether the fragility that produced the Civil War era, and the unfinished business of racial slavery, could recur in another form. Blight traces how the war's political, constitutional, racial, and economic legacies shaped Reconstruction and later American institutions, using Yale's own historical ties to slavery as one thread in the larger argument. The lecture format is straightforward classroom instruction, delivered to a Yale audience as part of a numbered course, with Blight working through primary sources and historiographical debate rather than survey summary. It sits within a larger series tracing the war's consequences from the 1860s forward into modern commemoration and politics.