The addition of the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment gave citizenship to anyone born in the United States and guaranteed equal protection to all people. And the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed all citizens the right to vote.

But it took the civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties to enforce many of those promises.

Historian David Blight says Americans are still debating many of the same issues as they were a century and a half ago.

DAVID BLIGHT: "Every time Americans debate the problem of states' rights, the relationship of federal power to state power -- which we are indeed having a roiling debate again -- and every time we debate not only race relations, but the very idea of what it means to be an American, multi-racial, greatly diverse society, we are debating the direct legacies of the Civil War."

And that's IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. You can learn more about American history at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Christopher Cruise.

Contributing: Susan Logue Koster