In the 1870s the unfinished work of Reconstruction reached its political end. The 15th Amendment promised Black men the vote, federal force briefly crushed the Ku Klux Klan, and then economic panic, Northern weariness, and a disputed presidential election produced the Compromise of 1877. Federal troops left the South. At the same time the Plains exploded in the Great Sioux War, the Great Railroad Strike revealed industrial class conflict, and a new Gilded Age began to take shape. Jim Rand walks through the decade when political bargains closed one era and ordinary people on both sides of the color line and the frontier paid the lasting price.

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