This essay original appeared in The Worlds of James Buchanan – Thaddeus Stevens, ed. Michael J. Birkner, Randall M. Miller, and John W Quist, LSU Press, (2019), 82-108. “General Jackson is dead”: Dissecting a Popular Anecdote of Nineteenth-Century Party Leadership…
Author: Matthew Pinsker
ESSAY –After 1850
This chapter originally appeared in Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America, 1775-1860 ed. D.A. Pargas, U Press Florida, (2018), 93-115. After 1850: Reassessing the Impact of the Fugitive Slave Law Matthew Pinsker The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law…
ESSAY –Election of 1948
In Fall 2016, Dickinson College student Trevor Diamond explained how some older American political customs were dying by the time of the 1948 presidential election. Election of 1948
IMAGE: Suffrage Parade (1912)
This photograph by the Associated Press depicts a woman’s suffrage parade in New York on Saturday, May 4, 1912. Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had begun popularizing the tactic of urban suffragist parades as…
ESSAY –Lincoln and Obama
This opinion piece by Matthew Pinsker originally appeared in The Weekly Wonk, an online magazine from the New America Foundation, in June 2014. The original title was “Obama’s Lincoln Moment.” There was a particularly tense period during the summer of 1862 when…
IMAGE –Bingham’s Stump Speaking
This classic composition by George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was part of a trio of “Election Paintings” that any classroom might use to illustrate the highs and lows of antebellum American democracy. The spread of universal suffrage for adult white…
ESSAY –Short History of Campaign Finance Reform
Matthew Pinsker offered this overview of American campaign finance history for the Christian Science Monitor in March 1997. The more things change… American politicians began shaking the money tree long before President Clinton or Newt Gingrich, but campaign finance reformers…
ESSAY –Lincoln’s Catty Letters
This op-ed by Matthew Pinsker appeared in Time.com on President’s Day 2014 as a way to introduce readers to some of the new Lincoln documents that had been discovered in recent years. Several of the links take readers to the full…
1780s
Overview The creation of the U.S. Constitution over the summer of 1787 and its subsequent ratification during the following year was a revolution equal in magnitude to the contest for American independence declared against Great Britain in 1776. Americans tend to…
1940s
Overview The 1940s witnessed the worst military conflict in world history. Out of more than 70 million combatants from 70 different countries, the editors at Digital History estimate about 17 million dead, including about 400,000 American military personnel out of…