Spanning the momentous years from 1863 to 1877, “Reconstruction” tracks the extraordinary stories of ordinary Americans — southern and northern, white and black — as they struggle to shape new lives for themselves in a world turned upside down. “People just cannot imagine how they’re going to put the country back together. The war has spiraled beyond the worst imaginings of anyone,” notes Edward L. Ayers, historian at the University of Virginia and a leading expert in Southern history and the Civil War, in the film. “Over 600,000 people had died in the last four years. The largest slave system in the modern world is in shambles and no one knows what’s going to replace it. The very fabric of life has been torn apart for everyone.”

“Reconstruction”’s remarkable cast of characters includes Tunis Campbell, a daring former minister who staked out an independent colony for blacks in Georgia’s Sea Islands — and declared it off limits to whites. Frances Butler, the daughter of a Georgia rice baron, struggled to rebuild her family’s plantations — and to negotiate labor contracts with the very men and women she used to own. Marshall Twitchell, a battle-scarred Civil War veteran from Vermont, made a dramatic bid for power in a wild northwest corner of Louisiana — with deadly consequences. John Roy Lynch, a former slave from Mississippi, was elected to Congress, where he challenged whites’ deepest beliefs about race and class.

The narratives of these and other unknown players are interwoven with the stories of presidents and generals — Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman — and others whose lives were caught up in the epochal struggles of the era. “An old social order had been destroyed,” says Eric Foner, historian at Columbia University and author of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. “Everything was up for grabs.” “Reconstruction” shows how, in just a few years, a series of stunning events — the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fourteenth Amendment granting ex-slaves citizenship in 1868, the enfranchisement of blacks the following year — reversed centuries-old patterns of race relations in America. People who for generations had been the property of others were now free to run their own lives.