Professor Masur’s talk will focus on the Reconstruction Era, when Americans for the first time tried to create a nation that lived up to the July 4, 1776, declaration that “all men are created equal.” The constitutional changes of the Reconstruction era shape many aspects of our lives today. Yet the period is often ignored or misrepresented. Masur will discuss how and why historians’ perspectives on the period have changed over time and why this process of “revisionism” is essential to historians’ work.
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About the Speaker
Kate Masur is a professor at Northwestern University who specializes in the history of race, politics, and law in the United States. She’s the author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and a New York Times “critics’ pick” for 2021.
Kate led a team of students and staff at Northwestern in the creation of Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice, a web exhibit associated with the Colored Conventions Project.
She regularly collaborates with museums and other nonprofits, including the National Park Service, the National Constitution Center, the Newberry Library, and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. She was a key consultant for the 2019 documentary, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War and appeared in the 2021 CNN film, Lincoln: Divided We Stand.
Kate regularly works with K-12 teachers and speaks with the media on topics including the Civil War and Reconstruction, Abraham Lincoln, monuments, and public memory. Her 2010 book, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, DC, was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize. She is co-editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era, published by University of North Carolina Press.
She lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her family.
Banner image: “Emblems of the Civil War” by Alexander Pope. Courtesy Dick S. Ramsay Fund, Governing Committee of The Brooklyn Museum, and Anonymous Donors.
