Circumstances in which people are feeling extreme disorientation are potent breeding grounds for people who are willing to exploit it to take advantage in moments of crisis.

History also changes because of strange, flawed, deeply human people doing unremarkable, tedious, and often boring work.

Maine passed its first abortion statute in 1840, not long after the pardon of Dr. Call. Could there be a connection?

Denials of Black humanity, free and enslaved, coexisted with explicit acknowledgment that enslaved Black people, though legally deemed “property,” were people.

Sinha also greatly enlarges the temporal boundaries students are accustomed to (1865 to 1877), by covering the end of the nineteenth century—including labor reform movements, the subjugation of Native American tribes in the West, and the rise of American imperialism—into the Progressive era with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment.

I was shocked to find that British newspapers in early August 1863 described the Portrait being “entirely destroyed” by fire on a railway train.

Again and again, the filmstrip shows its viewers images of women in states of distress.

To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

Interposition was not a claim that state sovereignty could or should displace national authority, but a claim that American federalism needed to preserve some balance between state and national authority.

As a teacher, the Black convention movement in the 1850s has helped me to broaden my story of the origins of the Civil War, especially the pitfalls to avoid when it comes to focusing too heavily on the controversy over slavery in the territories.

Daniel’s preordained path as Republican steward began well enough, but it soon took a tragic detour.

Commemoration, commerce, and complex social connections combined to dictate the paths and diversions of this obscure object and others.

The senators, like the grand jurors, knew their man, and probably conceded that Temple had given him the hiding he had been asking for. 

While we strive to approach our discipline objectively—to maintain distance—we also want to bridge the gap between ourselves and the past. We want to understand it, to feel it, and distance makes that empathy difficult.

Cridge’s American utopia did not singularly hinge on technological innovation or economic equality. It was a comprehensive achievement that combined political and economic equality with women’s autonomy and health.

For eight years, he skillfully combined traditional elite dining with an anti-monarchical ideology and Virginian sociability in a way that pleased his dinner guests and promoted his own agenda.

Studying the aftermath of the evacuation from Tripoli provides perspective on the current fallout from the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Arnold’s unceasing efforts to elevate himself in society through marriage and professional work can be viewed through the lens of the houses he bought or built throughout his life.

In the early republic, social media had its own crucial importance, although what the media employed was not the tweet, but little bits of pasteboard.

One of the most persistent myths in American history is the idea that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 […]

Well, of course he was. American historical narratives have always told us so, and recent prize-winning tomes that agree on […]

Every recent presidential election cycle, about the time a campaign goes negative, newspapers run a story like the one in the […]

Myths about early American politics certainly abound, but different ones operate in different quarters of the culture.

[BLOGITORIAL NOTE: Just to model the true spirit of democratic pluralism, we wanted readers to know up front that today’s […]

A review of Michael Drexler and Ed White’s recent collaboration, The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

“[R]everence for the document is key to how people today think of the Constitution.”

“We the People” once had many ways of exercising their sovereignty besides those ordained and established in the Federal Constitution. […]

The Constitution’s compromises added an element of complexity to the Constitution that defies any effort to reduce it to Twitter-sized proslavery or antislavery soundbites that implicate or exonerate the founders.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Once the door was opened to popular control of government, who knew how far the people would go?

So mutilated did his Notes become, concludes Bilder, that even Madison himself eventually realized that he had lost forever the original convention proceedings of 1787.

By the end of the 1820s, Skidmore’s experiences in the workplace and at the polls led him to connect the revolutionary legacy of 1776 to a biting critique of the economic hierarchies that continued to structure society.

America’s ambivalence about labor is nothing new. In the colonial era the ruling class had nothing but contempt for anything that could be justly called “work.”

Despite its dramatic potential, however, the War of 1812 has suffered from a relative paucity of narrative attention.

Tracing the intellectual and economic connections between Black women, Black data and colored conventions in the antebellum era.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Cartoonists manipulated the meaning of the revolution metaphor for their own mischievous designs.

WERE EARLY AMERICAN ELECTIONS FOR WHITE MEN ONLY?

But the nature of woman’s role in the destiny of expanding America, for Farnham, presented its own dilemmas. What exactly is required of Woman to take up this profound, national responsibility?

“But what if women indeed were mentioned? Would we have to change our interpretation of the place of women in the Constitution?”

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Whatever the first amendment may say about the separation of church and state, religion has had a place in American politics, for better or worse, since the very founding of the nation.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue
Whether in fact Douglas was a scoundrel
had become the key issue in American politics
in 1858…

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Several cartoons from the presidential campaign of 1848 show Salt River as a foreboding obstacle for all who seek the nation’s highest office.

For the People can be profitably read as a sympathetic exposition of the various ways critics of American politics and society and adherents to popular sovereignty have been a mainstay of our political culture.

“Impracticable the electoral college surely is. And it is precisely because of its improbable construction that today’s electoral college remains one of the least altered institutions established by the Constitution of 1787. . .”

2016 will mark not just the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, but also the 200th anniversary of the creation of the first ever lobbying agency in the national capital, an agency that was founded by a Delaware factory manager named Isaac Briggs.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

There is a romantic notion that this American expansion was achieved by settlers unaided by government—the rugged frontiersmen of the mythic West. In reality, however, the United States expanded through state action.

In the years that followed the annexation, plans for the next North American grab (or purchase) of Mexican lands became a regular topic of debate on the pages of U.S. newspapers.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History illuminates the early republic’s “unknown known”—its political unconscious—with incredible precision.

The power base for revolution was with the great mass of slaves who became the nouveau libres. Toussaint in all his rhetoric identified himself with that group, to which he did not in fact belong.

In recovering the vibrant presence of Saint Domingue/Haiti in these American moments, both books exemplify the power and promise of adopting an Atlantic lens in telling a national story…each offers a new view onto the familiar landscape of American political development between the Revolution and Reconstruction.

If blackmail is ultimately about silence, and if silence cannot—by definition—be tracked, how is one to find signs that blackmail might be present?

If there was one thing Revolutionary orators knew, it was that if you wanted to move people to action, you had to touch something deep within them.

Congress sought to impose frugality and economic restraint as a means to unite a divergent people.

Beneath and between its profoundly conservative and aristocratic institutions, Paine’s Britain was a rude, irreverent place where power was fragmented and liberty celebrated.

Historians have tended to assume that enslaved people inevitably, and eagerly, resisted slavery in a quest for liberty. Yet in fact, in the Berbice rebellion, many enslaved people were reluctant to join.

while students may giggle when the first clip begins, they really do listen to and enjoy the music.

Carp’s Boston Sons of Liberty are not the vanguard of the revolutionary era, as we have often seen them depicted, but rather a lot of wayward republicans.

“As a result of their proximity to legal proceedings, many tavern keepers worked as common lawyers in addition to running their hostels.”

It should be said that the founders’ views on these matters have not survived strict historical scrutiny.

“Which babies born outside the U.S. count as Americans from birth? And which men and women can bestow U.S. citizenship, automatically, upon their children?”

“Marshall remade the Court.”

Thomas Crawford’s “Statue of Freedom”

“In 1767 the author of a letter to the editor of the New York Journal bemoaned the fashion that led women to double the size of their heads with the use of pomatum, artificial pads, and hair procured from corpses. But most distressing of all, the writer claimed, the ‘frizzled’ style resembled the ‘shock head of a Negro.'”

The banyan announced something about the inner mind and character of the man who wore it.

Clay embodied both union and conflict. He had been the subject of political pageantry as politics and popular culture developed alongside one another in the early nineteenth century.

A more extravagant disregard for instructions on his second expedition would lead him deep into California—still a part of Mexico—and would win him not censure, but fame.

It is an issue of authority; namely, who has enough of it to be qualified to decide what’s best for the global environment.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

That the federal government created this health care system for merchant mariners in the early American republic will surprise many.

The resolve of Philadelphia’s medical elite as well as their patients was quickly tested after the war by the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.

The English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630 formed a society as committed to religion as any in history. But for them, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Now, instead of antiseptic and ahistorical entities, institutions became intensely historical and capable of dramatic and dynamic change.

When the ballots were certified on January 13, 1842, the people of Rhode Island found themselves with two constitutions.

In polarizing times, there is a price to be paid—at the polls and otherwise—for attempting to chart a middle path.

Down and dirty in eighteenth-century London and Boston

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Massachusetts’ earliest laws were hostile to bowling.”

The ephemerality of this document contrasts with the indelible event it announced: Spain’s final closure of the port of New Orleans to Americans.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

By changing the head, the coat, and the background building, the publisher could quickly produce a dignified presidential image with all the expected components of high office.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that […]

Jefferson used the library he sold to Congress as a self-fashioning project to shape his legacy and the way he wished to be viewed by posterity.

Nineteenth-century Americans abandoned the traditional English phrasing of “standing” for election and begin to describe candidates who “run” for office. The race was on.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Early northern black church voting may be the missing link in our understanding of black political consciousness and civic mindedness.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

There were far more Democrats in the 1850s who still supported the antiquated honor code that justified dueling than there were Whigs.

Across the pantheon of presidential elections in early America, few have stressed the themes of sex and gender so spicily as the heated contest of 1856. It was a year of many firsts.

As I read this book in the midst of yet another presidential election cycle, it was nearly impossible not to find strong parallels between these figures and our own presidential candidates.

Twain and Wong countered the nativist visions of white masculinity characteristic of popular romance novels featuring historical or foreign settings.

I realized that in order to help my students fully understand how black abolitionists in the North thought about the meaning of the Civil War, I needed to engage some issues that were not raised in Savannah and to explore how other black leaders defined freedom.

I want to begin to sketch out a definition of loyalism that is not inherently prejudicial…

When we read the war from the perspective of female Loyalists, Loyalism becomes even more inclusive.

If we think of the War of Independence as a civil war fought between British subjects, we also get a sharper look at revolutionary politics during and after 1775-1776.

In recent years we have seen a surge of interest in American loyalists. Highlights of this renewed attention to loyalists […]

The case appears closed. But was Dr. Church really a spy for the British?

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

What would it be like to start off in life as a severely handicapped slave?

“When an AP story on an errant buffalo in Ulster County or a canine candidate for statewide office in Florida is not available, Sun reporters produce their own accounts of dogs rescued at sea or giant turtles recaptured by German police.”

What falls within American Revolution scholarship? To what larger questions and themes should our more focused work speak?

Not everyone in colonial Philadelphia was pleased about having the hours rung on the state house bell.

Steven K. Green demonstrates how easily the historical inventions of one era may become the historical facts of another.

There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example
of how it works.

There has never been a shortage of negative depictions of Burr, but it has become a nearly two-centuries-old cliché that he “has always been out of favor,” that he has only enjoyed the reputation of “outright villain” among the founders.

For Cheney, the Imperial Presidency is a matter of personal and ideological conviction.

“I had argued that the establishment of the presidency proved to be the single most difficult and puzzling problem in institutional design that the Framers of the Constitution had confronted.”

“[L]et’s first distinguish between at least three distinct kinds of Clinton hating: conservative Clinton hating, left-liberal Clinton hating, and cosmopolitan Clinton hating.”

Each generation has contextualized the sexuality of the founders differently but ultimately came to value them as role models for their masculinity and sexuality.

As students write and perform toasts, they attempt to speak the (often combative) language of 1790’s politics.

I have visited tribal casinos in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, but none of them compare to the Mohegan Sun . . .

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

It was far less labor intensive—and therefore less expensive—for a painter or engraver to render a head than a full figure posed against an elaborate background.

British flogging of impressed American sailors was particularly resented because of its association with the treatment of slaves in the southern states.

Hinman’s book was about the dirty, miserable, and joyful minutiae of soldier life in the Union army.

Indiana’s Infidel Congressman Locals refer to southwestern Indiana as “The Pocket,” but politicians know this region by a more ominous […]

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

We ought to be asking ourselves what kind of democracy we want and what kind of democracy a particular leader or movement is offering.

For Brooks, antebellum political abolitionists—not the Populists, not the Progressives—deserve to be remembered as “the most important third-party movement in American history.”

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

[The County Election] also parodies the men in the crowd, who are divided…by the moral valence of their characters…

In an election year where claims to transparency seem deeply opaque, Foutch recalls the moment when the way to save democracy was clear as glass.

Almost every child in the United States learns who John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson […]

Weaving the Wicked Web of Antebellum Religion and Politics “Douglas is a cuning dog & the devil is on his […]

The question of national integrity in Canada is a perennial one.

In this formative period between Revolution and Civil War the language of suicide became a conspicuous resource for the advancement of larger arguments about the proper balance to be struck between liberty and order.

In Abolitionist Geographies Martha Schoolman challenges the dominant maps of nineteenth-century American literary studies.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Many who write books about the founders focus on mythic “character” rather than the real political environment, the nasty manner of politics.

“Raphael’s claim that Massachusetts had completed the ‘first’ American Revolution in the latter of half of 1774 raises the perennial question as to what was the Revolution and how to periodize it.”

“Collective sovereignty is not what Americans sought. They wanted a rule of law that was consistent and fair.”

A “Topping People” could well be considered the definitive insider’s take on the eighteenth-century Virginia elite.

Patent trolls are of much too recent origin for Jefferson to have ever looked one in the eye.

American appeals for government action were framed in terms of requests by liberal, self-interested individuals, rather than the older, public logic of republicanism.

Revolutions in France and Haiti, or at least antislavery writers’ use of them, hastened calls for immediate emancipation, the association of the South with violence and depravity, and the rise of American sectionalism.

As “disunion threats materialized into a regional program, and as images of revolution and invasion swirled in the political atmosphere,” Republicans grew increasingly antagonistic towards Southern ultimatums.

While O’Shaughnessy is always willing to criticize the men he profiles and to highlight the ways in which their personalities shaped their choices for better and worse, his treatments are consistently generous.

Public opinion, explosive economic growth, and jealous state legislatures would not countenance the abolition of corporations.

It turns out that historians’ inconsistent chronology had not actually been “wrong”; it was incomplete.

Gone are the days of poring over microfilm for weeks to find data relevant to particular research interests. With this sleek Website, a few pointed searches can unveil hundreds of pertinent published documents for scholars interested in various topics related to early American history.

As with the Indian treaties portal, the intended audience for this site is not altogether clear. Perhaps the goal is simply to create a platform for further investigation by anyone who wants to learn more about the Omahas.

The sovereign vacuum created by the inability of any power to serve the needs of backcountry settlers politicized the early national West.

It is fair to say that had the election in Virginia’s Fifth District gone the other way, the nation’s early political history would have been considerably altered.

Americans expressed remorse for their lost place in the British empire and their dissatisfaction with the new political order of an independent democracy wrought by economic and moral conflict.

This is quite a big, startling argument.

The labor theory of settlement contains some conflicts with the standard liberal account.

The challenge facing New Yorkers in Columbia County was how to make the political order legitimate in the eyes of those Americans who either lacked the vote or lacked the right to own the land they labored.

In their law talk, Americans had to grapple with difficult questions such as the purpose of punishment, the right to judge, and the authority of lawgivers

I do not see the nation unfolding in a linear progression away from “Britishness” and towards cultural independence. Instead, what my research shows is that in the years following the Revolution […] Americans vacillated between emulation and repudiation of the mother country.

The new United States was born of a violent and sudden revolution. For decades after that revolution, the states, far from united, were an uncertain amalgam of diverse peoples, religions, and languages.

In a three-day period in August 1835, Baltimoreans engaged in a tumultuous riot that killed five people, injured twenty others, […]

Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: […]

Economic concepts are explored in this book, but without the intimidating formulas and regressions that would normally send students accustomed to a predominantly narrative-driven discipline running for the hills.

Baics’s primary concern is to understand the benefits and costs of public markets and their deregulation for the living standards and material well-being of all of the city’s inhabitants.

If there ever was a time when American media was unbiased, it was certainly not during the Revolutionary War.

New things are happening with the Stamp Act, and this volume should signal to a broad range of scholars that 1765 is a good year for deep thinking.

Nearly since the ink was drying on the Declaration of Independence, nationalistic Americans have opined that American nationhood was inevitable, […]

In taking seriously northern Republicans’ egalitarian ideals and the world-historical significance they attributed to the Union, Riley offers an important corrective to scholarship that exaggerates the political influence of racism.

Dutch tolerance is best understood as an elastic system whose properties must be inferred from the historical record of the homeland as well as that of each colony.

Rented slaves built federal forts, roads, and the United States Capitol. Sometimes they served as soldiers and sailors.

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg have written a monumental work, detailing the lives of two men—James Madison and Thomas Jefferson—whose […]

The birth of a nation is not only or always a national story.

Deliberation is no doubt put to the ideological test in the pages of this book, and it does not always come out shining.

Slave status, in short, could be reaffixed based on the assumption that a former slave’s “consent” to travel back home reflected an “implied contract” to re-enter slavery.

After the Judiciary Act of 1789, courts came to wrestle with the need to mediate between state and federal judiciaries as they operated within a single overarching polity.

In the Federalist view, “self-created” associations—that is, those operating without charters and government sanction—were illegitimate because they divided the community instead of uniting it, as the agencies of civil society should do.

While readers may remain unconvinced that Fenno or Duane should share the spotlight with Thomas Jefferson, this book makes it abundantly clear that they were not bit players.

The world was rife with risk and uncertainty for early America’s urban middle classes, facing as they did the caprices […]

Brian Murphy’s argues that the seeds of business corporations were planted during the early republic.

Common-place talks with Jessica Choppin Roney, author of Governed by a Spirit of Opposition.

“How to establish a French province in America without immigration? A solution presented itself in the transformation of Indians into Frenchmen.”

Nelson’s driving argument is that the “fear of legislative tyranny” that animated royalists in the 1640s and 1650s also shaped the constitutional thought of an influential group he labels “patriot royalists.”

The CCP is committed to making available historical Black activism because it speaks to issues that occupy today’s movements, today’s concerns, today’s changing same.

This project narrates the Colored Conventions Project’s work to transcribe, catalogue, and visualize the minutes of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions.

Freedom occupies a permanent place in our national consciousness.

Working with publishers, libraries, and archives, digital humanities projects can work to liberate African American history.

The minutes of Colored Conventions constitute one of the most important bodies of primary sources in African American history. The […]

Matthew Garrett, Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 256 pp., $65. Matthew Garrett’s […]

“As matters now stand,” he sadly concluded, “there is a United North against a United South, and both marching to the field of blood.”

There’s an old military proverb: No army ever rode into battle shouting fine distinctions. In Philip Gould’s Writing the Rebellion, […]

Government by Dissent is an engaging meditation on one of America’s founding fantasies—the fantasy of democratic self-government. In 1776 Thomas […]

When I was a teenager in Catholic school developing a sense of political consciousness, I fixated on the Apostle Jude, […]

Swashbucklers, rogues, and scoundrels—the legacy of early modern sea rovers in popular culture has made piracy basically synonymous with villainy. […]

Caleb Smith, The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 288 pp., $35.

Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 350 pp., $29.99.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Acting out of a world still organized around the tenets of mercantilism, colonial Americans invented another approach to value.

More than two centuries into our national experiment, it is still a vexing question: What is popular sovereignty? Who are […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The sense of purpose that guided settlers, that covered the distance from old to new, created a most bourgeois environment of great expectations, of possibilities, even entitlement.”

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s bloody fourth year, it is perhaps appropriate to ask: […]

In these accounts Washington did not add “So help me God” to the oath. In fact, no account of his inauguration, either contemporaneous or later, has Washington saying “So help me God”—until 1854.

So, over this past weekend I was sweating over a long-overdue article [hi, Sean!] on Philip Freneau, the so-called “poet […]

U.S. citizenship and suffrage have not always been two sides of the American coin. . . . the voters who elected presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln included many thousands who were not United States citizens.

How did a speech that began in Kansas end up in the Caribbean, by way of Crimea?

The backlash against these American laws and their increasingly global reach raises a question: does this regime of intellectual property law represent something intrinsic about the United States—not just its economy, but its culture and society?

How did a working-class drunkard with little formal education become a narrator of hard times to society at large?

The secrecy of brotherhood made brothers; men achieved their highest emotional possibility in republican secrecy.

A Cultural Historian’s View of Civil War Memorials at Appomattox, Fredericksburg, and Island Mound When I go to the battlefields, […]

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

The disputed result of the 2000 election brought questions of materiality and meaning, which are frequently studied in academic settings, to the streets and the courts.

While the lyrics conveyed forceful messages to the eighteenth-century public, the music also spoke to listeners.

There is an interesting map up at Newsweek‘s web site illustrating what the magazine calls “a surprising correlation between the […]

Historians interested in religion and politics in the early American republic have long seen the American Revolution as the catalyst […]

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Contingency is in; inexorability is out.

Eighteenth-century French armies marched at one of two tempos.

Freemasonry and these notions of public and private, legality and illegality, justice and injustice, have crossed paths more than a few times.

Since the doleful events of September 11, one of the points made by almost everyone, from the president to television […]

Common-place injects a new issue into the political campaign as the 2016 presidential race enters its final stage.

Kentucky’s Belated Embrace of Abraham Lincoln Earlier this year, Skyler Hornback, a 12-year-old from Sonora, Kentucky, racked up $66,600 on […]

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Does literature matter to politics and law?

Nineteenth century social and economic knowledge at once functioned as an instrument of capitalism while also serving as a tool for minimizing capitalism’s most disturbing consequences.

With so many uses, the almanac, like an iPhone, was truly interactive.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“In a city increasingly characterized by class and ethnic distinctions, the trip in by train was arguably the one significant personal experience that more Chicagoans had in common than any other.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“It was very hot and damp six months a year, it was one of the least-favored ports in the New World, and huge swarms of insects appeared seasonally with terrifying predictability.”

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson On a chilly weekend shortly before Christmas, the Stunning Significant Other (hereafter, SSO) and I took […]

  It’s rare for a single work of scholarship to fundamentally change the way I teach a topic in U.S. […]

Currier and Ives never intended to produce prints of great value. They sold their products for as little as fifteen cents and no more than three dollars. Rather than aspiring to have their work exhibited in the nation’s fine-art museums and galleries, they sought to have it hung on the walls of America’s homes, stores, barbershops, firehouses, barrooms, and barns.

To ask whether a revolution is a civil war narrows the topic considerably, forcing us to focus on the war itself, the violent and more troubling part of the story.

Participation in a privileged culture of masculinity was an important part of achieving and maintaining political power.

Human love, not a wrenching religious conversion or spiritual journey, determined Johnston’s trajectory.

Through what mechanism do actual people suffer when a bank fails? To the modern ear, the very question sounds naïve, at best.

How could any scholar claim to have seriously interpreted the history of the
Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

American state, without foregrounding the experience of those peoples who were first, most frequently, and most punishingly targeted by government policy in the United States?

May 27, 2008 Are You Smarter Than an Eighth Grader? No, you’re not. Here are the questions Isaac had to […]

The “new atheism” derives from a long-established free-thinking tradition in which Thomas Paine has a key place.

The way Arizona Mormons remember their history, they were victims. They endured persecution and prevailed. From another perspective, they were aggressors.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Both the supporters and detractors of the Vigilance Committee claimed to have not only God and the right, but also ‘the ladies’ on their side.”

McIntosh championed the soprano-led ensemble, softer singing style, proper enunciation, and a more affected style of performance characteristic of both liturgical-based denominations such as Episcopalians, Catholics, and Lutherans, as well as members of polite society.

This is the Abraham Lincoln of America’s monuments.

Historians, find the pattern Assuming there is one, besides electoral fear. Any thoughts? Any other maps this resembles?   September […]

My sister has a box of extraordinary things such as are not to be seen every day.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Before the secret ballot became the national standard, election ballots were a vivid genre of print ephemera.

The early banks were typically established by individuals with common ties—whether political, social, or commercial in nature.

If Paine’s brand of radicalism helped mark the ideological dividing line between Republicans and Federalists in the 1790s and 1800s, his words have more recently been appropriated by politicians from across the political spectrum.

Americans fought righteously, and with their eyes on the main chance. They fought for themselves, for their comrades in arms, for their families, for their communities, and with God on their side.

April 28, 2008 End-of-the-semester blues Travel and end-of-the-semester workload issues have kept me off of here a little longer than […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“This was the great idea that, out of the wreckage of Spanish imperialism to which the Catholic Church had attached itself, came from the variously sanctified and base mixings of the Americas: the stunning idea that people were not one thing or the other, nor even some cross between two civilizations, but some new mestizaje, some new way of being altogether.”

But researchers doing only word searches will miss not only context, but also what might lurk just beneath the headlines.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

These groups exhibited several shared traits, most notably adherence to social elitism, masculine identity, and transatlantic modes of polite culture.

I treasure many of the conversations I had with my fellow citizens at their doorsteps, and I think if I had been blessed with musical talent, I could have waxed as lyrical about suburbanites as another Woody did about hoboes and Okies.

History teachers have gladly taken on the role of enabling citizenship, whether directly or indirectly. But that enterprise is undercut by standardized testing.

Why was it, then, that such reverential colonists came to desecrate the king?

Schocket builds the case for how the economic elite of Philadelphia reasserted power and authority by using the corporate form to counter the leveling effect of the Revolution.

Frances Trollope, the English-born Tory, found American religious habits loathsome (in truth, she found most everything about America loathsome). But […]

Hayley’s arrival in Boston was reported in newspapers from New England to South Carolina.

We learn how, when, and where High Federalism began to alienate Americans with its disturbing encroachments on the most basic forms of democracy and dissent.

What was Burr to do, once the path to further political advancement was barred?

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

“[T]he debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment is surprisingly recent.”

In short, free American males could have owned firearms to further their personal happiness and should have owned firearms to help protect the community.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“With the cities’ growing political awareness and new methods and ideas, Bridenbaugh celebrates them as the seedbeds of a nascent American identity, the Enlightenment in the New World, the American Revolution, and its concurrent social transformations.”

Dolley Madison proved a premier influence peddler, though she would have never seen her work that way nor would her contemporaries.

It was the absence of slavery that allowed for fair taxation in the North. Conversely, the paranoia surrounding the future of slavery—or at least the fear that slaves might be taxed to emancipatory levels—afflicted southern polities.

Unbecoming British offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary history of identity formation in the United States between the Revolutionary War and the […]

“Is the American constitutional system meaningfully democratic, or is it a system that confines its democratic elements within such elaborate systems of indirect representation and checks and balances that it effectively preserves domination by established elites?”

What do I want students to get out of this particular hour and fifteen minutes we will spend together—and, more importantly, what do I want them to get out of the study of history?

Newspaper articles and editorials suggested that there was something morally improper about leaving so many thousands of bodies exposed for the amusement of urchins and stray dogs, or left to rot in packed trenches, awaiting medical-school body snatchers.

What separated Virginia from Pennsylvania and condemned the Old Dominion to second-rank industrial status was quite simply slavery.

If Adams had not settled the Quasi-War with France and demobilized the army, might the Federalists have attempted a coup?

[T]he arrival of European explorers such as Champlain and even ostensibly peaceful settlers such as Penn set off a violent chain reaction among native peoples, creating a culture of warfare, which ensnared almost everyone.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

The emphasis of our special issue is two-fold: scholarly perspectives on political phenomena that connect the early American republic with the present, on the one hand; on the other […] an expansion of readers’ definition of what counts as “political history.”

“[T]he full hall at the Virginia Theatre snickered every time God, the Devil, or magic was mentioned. For a New York theater-going audience the notion that such ideas could carry intellectual and emotional weight seemed ludicrous.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Urban Crucible and some of Nash’s articles from the 1970s provided a model of how crucial and previously unknown details of the lives of ordinary people could be extracted from dry-as-dust tax lists, account books, and the like, and used to tell a new story of how the colonial city worked.”

March 31, 2008 Barack Obama, Glenn Loury, and the American Historical Narrative Over at TPM Cafe, former black conservative Glenn […]

By the late eighteenth century, Americans were well on their way to understanding democracy as a process, really the process, for pursuing politics.

February 29, 2008 Seems Like Old Times, I: Nationalizing the state militias One of the features I have planned for […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The social center of Havana was in its harbor. Something interesting happened there almost every day.”

“As the war with Iraq loomed through the 2002-03 school year, we heard echoes from conflicts throughout U.S. history.”

Modern Franklin Gets the Boot [UPDATED] Outbreaks of popular resistance against expert medical advice are a long Anglo-American tradition, and […]

    <<One of many glamorous moments of the 1988 Al Gore campaign that I did not see. Scene of […]

The design of the communion spoon and the silver beaker reflected the political values that held together the first British Empire.

June 30, 2008 The Age of Analogies   One of Josh Marshall’s posts last week noted the dismal failure of […]

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

The layout of a voting machine harbors implications about meaning, about what is and what is important, and therefore harbors politics in its broadest sense.

The issue here is not one of historical merit but whether tools intended to give voice to the voiceless should be used on elites whose immense paper trails allow them to speak.

October 2008

Translating John and Abigail’s correspondence into contemporary social media posts prompted students to look outward and consider the continuities and discontinuities between past and present social media.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“[O]ur authors have consciously adopted an untraditional approach to urban history, illustrating the social, legal, and political workings of these young urban societies by writing about a particular incident, a place, an encounter, a person, or a group of urban people.”

“It may seem natural to us that in 1825 the children and grandchildren of minutemen would commemorate the fight at the North Bridge. It was not.”

With history like this, I thought, who needs fiction?

Electricity was one of the leading branches of experimental science in the Enlightenment, certainly the branch with the highest public profile owing to the proliferation of commercial entertainments after the 1740s, both in Europe and British America, where customers willingly paid for the novel experience of having the “electric fire” course through their bodies.

“Professor Kars, too, tries to walk the path between cultural conflict and structural change, with limited success.”

I have long thought that now-President Obama’s reputation as an orator was little inflated, more by a media and public […]

“Yes, the Constitution is often publicly praised. But it is more often debated and argued about.”

Common-place asks David Waldstreicher whether Franklin deserves his reputation as the nation’s antislavery founder.

Whereas during the Revolutionary era wearing American-made clothes signified frugality and private sacrifice for the public good, by the mid-nineteenth century wearing American-made clothes signified prosperity and the rapid growth of the nation’s internal commerce and industrial capacity.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“For Baltimore’s elected officials, prominent merchants, and moral reformers (who were often in fact the same people), the bad behavior of their working-class neighbors required much attention. Petitions to the city council complained of black women washing clothes too boisterously in a stream, Irish laborers singing too late into the evening, and unsupervised apprentices, servants, and slaves cursing and gambling in the marketplace.”

July 29, 2008 Tennessee church shooter targets conservative historical fiction It appears that the angry white guy who shot up […]

“[W]hile the New York Times and the Boston Globe are gleefully covering Historygate, is anyone, besides the Weekly World News, talking about history?”

If John Adams recognized Winthrop as a Founding Father, and was joined in that judgment by a growing number of Americans in the nineteenth century, how and when did we manage to forget Winthrop?

Is it possible to write an intellectual history of early American theology that keeps readers awake, and indeed eager to turn each page?

August 29, 2008 Vice Grip . . . on the media’s imagination, blogosphere included. Finally, we come to the sense-shattering […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“When the legislature was occupied with other matters, the inattention permitted a kind of anarchy. Nowhere is the fluidity more apparent than in the naming of streets.”

The 1824 Presidential Election  is one of the most well remembered, primarily because it is the only election ever forced into the House of Representatives because no candidate succeeded in getting a majority of electoral votes (different from the 1800 Presidential Election in which two candidates got a majority, thus forcing the passing of the 12th Amendment).

“The challenging, yet glorious, differences among visitors’ expectations when they come to Independence Hall constitute a unique opportunity for learning.”

January 31, 2008 Goody Bags Bad The eloquently nasty James Wolcott made a sharp comment on the historical contribution to […]

This page presents some of the same links that appear on my original home page, along with some new ones, […]

If there is a blacklist, I have yet to see it—maybe when I make full professor.

“If the many questions directed to a New York City history Website I co-supervise are any indication—including a certain befuddlement by visitors when they fail to locate information about events wholly invented in the film—audiences believe its story.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The fact that everyone in the city helped to build or run the new government led to a new kind of domesticity that was literally shaped by national politics, although in ways L’Enfant and Washington could not have foreseen.”

My two little boys love the kids’ sections of megabookstores, so a trip to Borders to get out of the […]

Things have not been as active as they might have been around here because we are busy are completing what […]

“With respect to federalism, the twentieth century has witnessed a massive increase in the power of the national government, produced above all but not only by the New Deal.”

“The study guide, official or unofficial, is the least common denominator and the most common purchase at most of our state colleges and universities.”

“The Washington experience is one that my students never forget.”

“In their speeches in Philadelphia, their private letters [ . . . ], and their newspaper essays, the Framers made it abundantly clear that they expected the Constitution to benefit creditors and Americans who had speculated, whether in Indian land or war bonds.”

“The labor of taking notes, expanding them, and preparing himself as one of the most important participants in the debates, Madison said, nearly killed him.”

“That Democrats were an impetus behind the [antislavery] amendment is one of the surprises of Vorenberg’s narrative…”

“How good is The Founders’ Constitution at what it claims to do? The answer depends in part on what you choose to look at.”

Hillary Clinton’s opponents really need to hold her to her claims about her experience, and make sure she owns up […]

“Freeman convincingly demonstrates that the Founding Fathers of the United States not only hearkened to Old World notions like ‘rank,’ ‘character,’ and ‘fame’; they daily lived them.”

“How do students who have never produced original research papers begin to write about aspects of an important historical figure whose accomplishments have been mostly forgotten over time?”

“[W]ere there not shared understandings and assumptions that shaped political decisions as profoundly as did conflicting partisan ideologies–on occasion, even more profoundly?”

The cry for ‘apology,’ no matter how heartfelt, sounds positively quaint against the hotter rhetoric today’s activists embrace: Restitution. Redress. And, especially, reparation.

At the very least Linebaugh and Rediker break the tradition of treating mixed-race love as purely exploitative and herein lift such a union into a brave act of defiance.

Turning journalists into heroes takes some doing.

—The Mekons

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“When it comes to the United States Constitution, most historians reject the idea that its meaning can be reduced to some easy formula or series of sweeping generalizations.”

Moral Minorities tracks how vocal minorities argued for a place in American democracy.