Watch CBS News

Civil War

0407-sunmo-reconstruction-1823404-640x360.jpg

The story of Reconstruction

In the years following the Civil War known as Reconstruction, newly-freed African American men could finally vote, and would be elected to represent Southerners in Congress. But it was a period that would be transformed into an era of segregation and Jim Crow laws, and be taught to succeeding generations as a failed political experiment. Yet, Reconstruction is now being given its due in school curriculums, and in a new PBS documentary by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Mo Rocca talks with Gates, as well as with historian Eric Foner and author Lawrence Otis Graham, about some of the most noted African American figures in the post-Civil War era.

  • Apr 7, 2019
  • 08:14
0407-sunmo-billtraylor-1823364-640x360.jpg

The folk art of Bill Traylor

Born into slavery around 1853 in rural Alabama, Bill Traylor worked as a sharecropper for nearly five decades after the Civil War and Emancipation. But in his 80s, without work and homeless in Montgomery, he took a new path, as an artist. Painting on scraps of paper or cardboard, Traylor's folk art told the story of African Americans in the Jim Crow era. Chip Reid reports on "Between Worlds," an exhibition of Traylor's work, and life, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

  • Apr 7, 2019
  • 04:44
0616-sunmo-celebratingdad-1874637-640x360.jpg

Celebrating dad

How did Father's Day come about? It was thanks to a woman, Sonora Smart Dodd, who in 1909 proposed a day to celebrate fathers, like the widowed Civil War veteran who'd raised Dodd and her five brothers. But unlike Mother's Day, the idea was slow to catch on, and it would take decades for dads to get their due. Correspondent Nikki Batiste talks with retired NFL star Tony Gonzalez, a 2019 Father of the Year Award recipient, and with photographer Dave Engledow, the self-proclaimed "World's Best Father" (and he has the pictures to prove it).

  • Jun 16, 2019
  • 05:18
1020-sunmo-harriettubman-new-1955362-640x360.jpg

Harriet Tubman's road to freedom

Harriet Tubman, a tiny woman who could neither read nor write, pulled off superheroine-like exploits in the years before the Civil War. With the help of the Underground Railroad, she not only escaped from a Maryland plantation to freedom in the North, she went back, 13 times over 10 years, to guide more than 70 enslaved people to freedom. And during the war, she became the first American woman to lead troops into battle, near Beaufort, S.C. Martha Teichner visits historic sites that were part of Tubman's remarkable life story, and with actress Cynthia Erivo, who plays the iconic figure in a new biopic, "Harriet."

  • Oct 20, 2019
  • 08:27
Show More
View CBS News In
CBS News App Open
Chrome Safari Continue