Category: Slavery

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…

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 –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…