David Blight closes his Yale DeVane Lecture Series course on slavery and its legacies with a final class asking whether the American experiment itself can endure. The course has traced slavery and Yale, the Civil War, and the political, constitutional, racial, and commemorative aftershocks that followed, framing the question 'can it happen here' the way Sinclair Lewis once posed it about fascism in the 1930s. In this session Blight pulls those threads together, considering how Reconstruction's unfinished business, the rise and fall of Jim Crow, and ongoing fights over memory and monuments bear on the present health of a pluralistic, constitutional democracy. He speaks as a historian synthesizing a semester's argument rather than an activist advancing a program, drawing on Yale's own institutional ties to slavery as one case study among many. The lecture ends the course by asking what history's hinge points teach about the fragility, and resilience, of self-government.