Author: Matthew Pinsker

ESSAY –General Jackson is Dead

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…

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…

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…

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…