Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, will present the 2025 Hartman Hotz Lecture Series in Law and Liberal Arts at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 23.

Sinha, a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition, will deliver "The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic."

The lecture is free and open to the public and will take place in the Gearhart Hall Auditorium (GEAR 026).

For this lecture, Sinha will draw on her recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (2024), which has been praised in the Wall Street Journal and the Times Literary Supplement and lauded by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn as "a big and bold book ... marked by deep learning, expansive thinking and compelling arguments."

In this lecture, Sinha will discuss a new American republic, emerging through the destruction of slavery and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and finding its last expression in the 19th Amendment's nationalization of women's suffrage in 1920.

In line with recent scholarship, Sinha views Reconstruction as involving more than sectional questions of North and South. Unlike others, she sees the subjugation of native peoples, the emergence of industrial capitalism and American overseas expansion not as a part of a broader Reconstruction but as its overthrow and betrayal.

"The demise of the Second American Republic inaugurated an era of hierarchy and inequality — racial, ethnic, gendered and economic — rather than one of equal citizenship promised by the war for emancipation and Reconstruction," Sinha writes. "Democracy itself, the history of Reconstruction reveals, can be systematically overthrown and repressed for long periods in U.S. history."

Sinha is the president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Her earlier books include The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000), which Politico identified as one of the 10 best books on slavery, and The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), which won multiple awards and was named Editor's Choice in The New York Times Book Review. 

In addition to her full-length publications, she has written for the Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, New York Daily News, Time, Boston Globe, Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin and Huffington Post.

Sinha received her Ph.D in American history from Columbia University, where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize.

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About the Hartman Hotz Lectures in Law and Liberal Arts: Palmer and Marie Brase Hotz of Foster City, California, established the University of Arkansas Hartman Hotz Lectures in Law and the Liberal Arts to honor the memory of Palmer's brother, Hartman Hotz (1928-1981). Hartman Hotz earned a Bachelor of Arts in history from Fulbright College. After graduating from Yale University Law School, he joined the faculty of the U of A School of Law, where he made significant contributions to the study of law. All lectures in the Hotz series are sponsored by the U of A School of Law, Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, and the Hartman Hotz Trust Committee.

About the University of Arkansas: As Arkansas's flagship institution, the U of A provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $3 billion to Arkansas' economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, and discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the few U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research and Economic Development News.