Until recently, Reconstruction was a topic in American history of interest chiefly to high school juniors preparing to take the college advanced placement exam. During the thirteen years after the Civil War, the United States reintegrated the states that had seceded from the Union and struggled to define the legal status in them of African-Americans under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. By 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson reintroduced segregation to the federal workforce, the hard-fought gains of the episode had faded from living memory.