reconstruction

Meanings

1. The action of reconstructing something, not necessarily to the earlier state.
2. A thing that has been reconstructed or restored to an earlier state.
3. The act of restoring something to an earlier state.
4. The recreation or retelling of the (purported) events leading up to a certain outcome.
5. A result of linguistic reconstruction; a model representing an unattested linguistic unit: a phoneme, a morpheme or a word.

1. A period of the history of the United States from 1865 to 1877, during which the nation tried to resolve the status of the ex-Confederate states, the ex-Confederate leaders, and the Freedmen (ex-slaves) after the American Civil War.

Etymology

From re- + construction.