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: Slavery
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…
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…
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…
ESSAY –Man of Consequence
This essay originally appeared in Illinois History Teacher 16 (2009), pp. 16-33. It offer a compact overview of how Abraham Lincoln rose to power during the antebellum political crisis. Man of Consequence: Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s By Matthew Pinsker “The…
EXHIBIT –Lincoln Douglas Debates
The House Divided Project at Dickinson College has created an innovative digital classroom on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. The contest between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas was really the first public US senatorial campaign in American history and…
EXHIBIT –Daniel Anthony of Kansas
Dickinson student Taylor Bye created a fascinating web exhibit that explores that life of Daniel Anthony, the brother of Susan B. Anthony. Daniel was a noted abolitionist, Civil War soldier and Kansas journalist, whose life and career spanned some of…
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