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…
Category: Campaigns & Elections
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…
1930s
Overview When Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as president on March 4, 1933, the nation’s economic crisis had become the most severe in its history. Not only was unemployment rising and poverty widespread, but the banking system appeared…
1910s
The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed many sometimes-wrenching changes, and perhaps no decade was more profoundly revolutionary for the United States and the world than the 1910s. During this decade, American women finally gained the right to vote and…
ESSAY –McCutcheon and Campaign Finance Reform
The essay below originally appeared in The Weekly Wonk in April 2014, following the announcement of the Supreme Court decision in the case of McCutcheon v. FEC. Campaign Finance Beyond McCutcheon By Matthew Pinsker The history behind the dramatic…