History — American

Slavery, Reconstruction
& Civil Rights

Tools for exploring slavery, Reconstruction, and the long arc of civil rights in America — drawn from UW–Madison, MIT OCW, and H-Net H-Urban curricula.

chattel slaveryabolition movementReconstruction amendmentsfreedpeopleJim Crowcivil rights movementBlack Powermass incarcerationGreat MigrationHarlem Renaissanceracial uplift ideology
Exploration tools
01
Live

Reconstruction Codex

The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments — what they promised and what happened.

Explore the Reconstruction amendments: what each said, what freedpeople expected, how Reconstruction was dismantled, and the long aftermath through Jim Crow and the civil rights era.

02
Live

Great Migration

Pick a Southern city. Trace the routes north and west.

Pick a city of origin and trace the Great Migration routes — what pushed people out of the South, what drew them to Chicago or Detroit or Los Angeles, and what they found when they arrived.

03
Live

Civil Rights Timeline

Pick a year. See the organizations, the government response, the local tensions.

Year-by-year explorer of the civil rights movement — key events, the organizations involved, government responses, and the local and national tensions that shaped each moment.

04
Live

Racial Capitalism Timeline

Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, mass incarceration — how racial hierarchy was encoded into economics.

Pick an era and trace how racial hierarchy was encoded into economic structures — labor control, property law, credit markets, and the political economy of each period.

05
Live

Elder Codex

Intersectionality, the matrix of domination, the politics of respectability.

Explore Black feminist thought through Crenshaw, Collins, and hooks — what intersectionality means, how the matrix of domination works, and what the politics of respectability produced historically.

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