User:Hydrangeans/draft of Greater Reconstruction

The Greater Reconstruction refers to a period of intersecting racial tensions, westward settler colonialism, ideas about republican citizenship, and expanding federal governmental power in the history of the United States during the nineteenth century. Historian Elliott West coined the term as a framework for connecting the history of race in the American West to the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. []

Time frame
When he coined the term, Elliott West argued that the Greater Reconstruction began when the United States' westward territorial acquisitions in the 1840s "triggered an American racial crisis" in the perspective of racist Euro-Americans, "symbolically" ended with the 1877 defeat of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce in the Nez Perce War, and "practically" ended with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. According to historian William S. Kiser, the Greater Reconstruction ended with the 1898 Spanish–American War.

History
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