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really the second-- great disputed election in American history,
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and a sordid political compromise
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that most of us in textbooks and in teaching
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still call the End of Reconstruction.
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But I'm going to leave that question of
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when Reconstruction ended to all the great forthcoming books
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of my various graduate students who are going to solve that issue,
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and I'm going to probably suggest
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before we finish that it's never quite ended.
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But listen to just a couple of the public commentaries, that year,
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of America's centennial of independence
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and what they were thinking about.