The post-Civil War Reconstruction era — which saw the dramatic expansion of rights for African-Americans, followed by their violent rollback — is one of the most poorly understood periods in American history.

It’s also increasingly invoked as a touchstone for understanding our current moment. The election of Donald J. Trump has been seen as driven by a similar white backlash, in this case to America’s first black president. And growing charges of voter suppression in the run-up to the midterm elections have prompted, for many observers, a similar sense of déjà vu.

And that was before President Trump, in an interview this week, called for limitations on birthright citizenship, which was written into the Constitution in 1868 via the 14th Amendment, one of the era’s signal achievements.

“Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow,” an exhibition about Reconstruction and its aftermath at the New-York Historical Society through March 3, doesn’t draw explicit parallels to today’s politics. But perhaps it doesn’t have to.