Author: Matthew Pinsker

ESSAY –Election Day 1912

Dickinson College student Will Nelligan produced a creative examination of how ex-president Theodore Roosevelt experienced Election Day on 1912, when he was running as a Progressive or Bull Moose candidate in a three-way contest that included Democrat Woodrow Wilson (the…

ESSAY –Election Day 1896

Peter Wright offers a vivid portrait of William Jennings Bryan on the day of his defeat in 1896.  Bryan was the Democratic – Populist candidate for president who was overwhelmed by former Ohio governor William McKinley and the well-financed, well-organized…

REFERENCE –Founders Profiles

Dickinson College students study the Founders with great care, because the college itself was part of the American Revolutionary era, established as a school in 1773 and first chartered as a college in 1783.  The guiding spirit of the institution…

REFERENCE –Landmark Cases

Dickinson history majors in the senior seminar on the US Constitution have been attempting to build a series of research guides on Landmark Supreme Court cases.  Their work is evolving, but can be viewed at the History 404 course site…

ESSAY –Boss Lincoln

The essay by Matthew Pinsker originally appeared in The Living Lincoln, a collection of essays edited in 2011 by Thomas Horrocks, Harold Holzer, and Frank Williams in 2011 for Southern Illinois University Press.  The essay analyzes newly discovered documents that…

ESSAY –Man of Consequence

This essay originally appeared in Illinois History Teacher 16 (2009), pp. 16-33.  It offer a compact overview of how Abraham Lincoln rose to power during the antebellum political crisis. Man of Consequence: Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s By Matthew Pinsker   “The…