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Civil War

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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.

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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.

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