Patricia Garcia Rios

In just 60 years Chicago grew from a remote, swampy frontier town into one of the most explosively alive cities in the world. Captains of industry built empires through innovation, ingenuity, determination, and sheer ruthlessness, while the labor of millions of working men and women -- most of them immigrants from Ireland and Northern Europe -- helped reinvent the way America did business.

Spanning the years 1863 - 1877, Reconstruction tells the story of the tumultuous years after the Civil War during which America grappled with how to rebuild itself, how to successfully bring the South back into the Union and at the same time how the former slaves could be brought into the life of the country. This three-hour series interweaves the stories of key political players in Washington (among them, Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant) with the stores of ordinary people, black and white, Republican and Democrat, in the North and South, whose lives were caught up in the turbulent struggles of the era.