Date: Thursday, March 19, 2026

Time: 5:30pm to 7:00pm

Location: Kerwin Hall, Room 301 

Why did Reconstruction, America’s first attempt at building multi-racial democracy, fail? Mickey conceives of Reconstruction as the country’s first of many attempts to foster democracy and market economy after vanquishing an adversary. Explanations of nation-building efforts are better focused at conditions on the ground rather than the quality of interventions from Washington, D.C., as Mickey argues with respect to North Carolina.

Featured Speakers:

Robert Mickey is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on U.S. politics in comparative and historical perspective. He is interested in the country's belated democratization, its current democratic backsliding, and the place of racial conflict in each. Mickey is the author of Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972. He is now at work on a book-length study of Reconstruction and other episodes of U. S. nation-building (with David Waldner, UVA), and, with Ashley Jardina (UVA) and Vince Hutchings (Michigan), a study of the relationship between Americans’ racial attitudes and their support for democracy.