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…
Category: African American
1890s
Overview The nineteenth century had always been an age of certainties, but by the 1890s, some of the post-Civil War consensus about American civilization and progress was beginning to fragment as it had never quite done before. Populists challenged the distribution…
1880s
Overview As a young teacher at the Hampton Institute in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Booker T. Washington was responsible for helping to instruct and assimilate Native American or Indian men. The complexity of this assignment –a black teacher…
1860s
Overview When Booker T. Washington recalled the outbreak of the Civil War, he claimed that “every slave on our plantation felt and knew that, though other issues were discussed, the primal one was that of slavery.” Washington’s memory of life as young slave…
1870s
Overview The term “Reconstruction” has more than one meaning in American history. Usually it refers to the period from 1863 to 1877, as the federal government worked to “reconstruct” or “restore” former Confederate states back in the national system of…
ESSAY –Emancipation Moments
The essay excerpted below originally appeared in Emancipation at 150: The Impact of Emancipation, a special e-book anthology produced in 2013 on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln’s Cottage and the US Commission on Civil Rights. Emancipation…
ESSAY –Interpreting the Upper-Ground Railroad
The essay excerpted below originally appeared in Max van Balgooy, ed., Interpreting African American History and Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 75-88. It argues for a more sophisticated understanding of interpreting Underground Railroad sites, one that emphasizes how open much…
ESSAY –Underground Railroad and Coming of War
This essay by Matthew Pinsker originally appeared History Now (Winter 2010), an online magazine of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. It offers a concise explanation for why the Underground Railroad should be considered a primary factor in the coming…
COLLECTION –Slavery and Abolition
The libraries at Dickinson College and Millersville University formed a partnership to digitize more than 24,000 pages of nineteenth-century US pamphlets on slavery and abolition. Slavery & Abolition in the US
EXHIBIT –Remembering America Since 1945
In spring 2015, Dickinson students in History 118 (US Since 1877) conducted oral histories and produced essays with multi-media appendixes (such as podcasts or videos). Several of these extraordinary projects have been featured in this Storify essay summarizing their work.…