Greater Reconstruction

Greater Reconstruction
mid 19th century – late 19th century
Clockwise from top: John Gast's American Progress (1872) Freedmen's Bureau school (1866) Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce (1877) Chinese emigrants aboard S. S. Alaska (1876) Winfield Scott at the Siege of Veracruz (1847)
Location	United States
Including	Civil War era Reconstruction era
Key events	Mexican–American War American Civil War Fourteenth Amendment American Indian Wars Chinese Exclusion Act Edmunds Act Dawes Act Spanish–American War
Chronology Antebellum Era – Age of Jackson Gilded Age – Progressive Era

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The Greater Reconstruction was a period in the history of the United States during the nineteenth century characterized by racial tensions, westward settler colonialism, ideas about republican citizenship, and expanding federal power. After America claimed substantial western lands in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after winning the Mexican–American War, the federal government of the United States clashed over questions of political sovereignty and citizenship with several demographic groups who lived in or migrated to the newly claimed territory, such as American Indians, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mormons. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, there was similar debate about citizenship and sovereignty for ex-Confederates and recently emancipated African Americans in the southern United States. Americans and their governments debated who could belong in a country that was increasingly diverse. White Americans and government leaders often believed conforming to Euro-American cultural norms was a prerequisite to citizenship in the United States and were willing to empower the government to enforce such, even with force and violence.