Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut
April 8, time TBD
Location TBD

A second American republic emerged with the end of slavery during the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments’ reinvention of constitutional government and found its last expression in the nationalization of women’s suffrage in 1920. This republic’s destruction by 1900, inaugurated an era of hierarchy and inequality-racial, ethnic, gendered, and economic-rather than one of equal citizenship promised by the Civil War and emancipation. Democracy itself, the fall of Reconstruction reveals, can be systematically overthrown and repressed for long periods in U.S. history.

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and Past President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2022. She taught at the University of Massachusetts for over twenty years where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico. Her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, which won the Frederick Douglass, the Organization of American Historians’ Avery Craven, the Southern Historical Association’s biennial James Rawley, and SHEAR Best Book prizes, was also long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. It was widely reviewed and named editor’s choice in The New York Times Book Review and the book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication. She is the author and editor of several other books and articles. Her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 was published in 2024 by Liveright (Norton) and reviewed in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Republic among other outlets. It won the 2026 biennial President’s Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. She was nominated to the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lecture Series in 2003. She was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot in 2018 and at the University of Heidelberg in 2022, where she received the 2021 James W.C. Pennington award. A historian of the long nineteenth century, her research interests lie in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin, and The Huffington Post and has been interviewed by the national and international press.