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: Constitution
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
VIDEO –Interview on Civil War Politics
Pulitzer Prizer winning historian Mark Neely offers thoughtful comments on two-party politics and the suppression of civil liberties in the North during the American Civil War. Matthew Pinsker interviewed Neely on the Dickinson College campus in spring 2008.