As the semester begins to wind down, I am finishing my course in the first half of the U.S. history sequence. At the school where I teach, that course concludes with 1877 rather than 1865, which seems to be an increasingly widespread practice. Though the onward march of time pretty much guarantees that the midpoint of American history will continue to move forward, I do prefer a course that ends with Reconstruction over one that ends with the Civil War, independently of the amount of material to cover that each division would require. The reason for this is that Reconstruction, Read more