Welcome to our module on Education in the Postbellum Era. The Postbellum Era extends from the end of the Civil War, in 1865, to the decade surrounding the turn of the 20th century. It includes the Reconstruction period, 1865 to 1877, and in the south, it overlaps with the Progressive Era. The period follows the unimaginable horror of the US's bloodiest carnage, its Civil War. United by brute force, how would schooling evolve during this nation's post-war recovery? We look first at the phenomenal growth of primary schooling, common schooling, in the decades after the Civil War. This was a public good. Certainly, the most important social innovation of the 19th century, if not the most important social innovation in US history, yet common schooling was unequally distributed in the nation as a whole, given the fact of hardened and increasingly militant white racial prejudice in the 11 states of the former confederacy. As racial segregation forcefully belied the rhetoric of a democratic society, we give special emphasis to the education of African-Americans in the Postbellum Era. Finally, we turn to the expansion of the American high school, which in the Postbellum Era, replaced the private academy as the dominant form of secondary education in the US. As with common schools, the benefits of public high schools were slow to accrue for blacks and what became by 1890 the notorious Jim Crow South.