Support your local PBS station in our mission to inspire, enrich, and educate.

The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are known as the “Reconstruction Amendments,” but what happens if one or all of them get stripped from American history?

Historians describe the debate over extending civil rights to former slaves that divided the country after the Civil War. The same issues would re-emerge decades later, in the civil rights ...

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude ...

No State shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The Equal Protection Clause is one of the most litigated and significant provisions in contemporary ...

“The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution” (W.W. Norton and Co.), by Eric Foner It took the United States two tries to get the Constitution right. The first ...

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Dean Sophia Lee's article notes the evolution of Fourth Amendment rights to ...