Provides new insight into grassroots reconstruction after the Civil War, and into the lives of the newly emancipated African Americans.

Foreword Phillipp Schofield; 1. Introduction; 2. Wartime Washington; 3. The Freedmen's Bureau in the District of Columbia; 4. An 'experimental garden for the propagation of political hybrids': congressional reconstruction in the District of Columbia; 5. Reconstructing the city government; 6. Race, radicalism, and reconstruction: grassroots Republican politics; 7. A city and a state: governing the District of Columbia; 8. From biracial democracy to direct rule: the end of self-government in the nation's capital; 9. Conclusion.

Dr Robert Harrison (1944-2007) was a member of the Department of History and Welsh History at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, for more than thirty years. His numerous publications on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American politics, particularly on Congress and the District of Columbia, made a very significant contribution to the field. They include State and Society in Twentieth-Century America (1997) and Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State (Cambridge University Press, 2004). An active participant in the research community of American history, Dr Harrison was a long-standing member of BAAS and was closely involved in the British American Nineteenth Century Historians' organization (BrANCH), organizing two major conferences on American history in 2000 and 2004.