Historian David Blight continues his Yale DeVane Lecture Series course on slavery's legacies with a session on wartime reconstruction and how wars in American history end. Part of the 2024 course "Can It Happen Here Again? Yale, Slavery, and Legacies," this lecture, the nineteenth in the series, traces the political, constitutional, and commemorative aftershocks of the Civil War as they reshaped the country's institutions. Blight situates Reconstruction within a broader argument about pivot points when the American experiment in pluralistic, constitutional democracy has been genuinely at risk, drawing a throughline from the 1860s to present-day debates over inequality and democratic fragility. The lecture is delivered in Blight's characteristic classroom style, working through primary sources and historiography rather than slides, aimed at students already following the course's arc from slavery through the Civil War to its long legal and political legacies.