Kinder Fellow Benjamin Park's Lecture on Early Ideas of Nation

On Friday, October 3, 2014, Kinder Forum Postdoctoral Fellow Benjamin Park delivered a lecture entitled “Nationalism Beyond the Nation-State” in Read Hall on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia.

Dr. Park’s talk, the first in a series of history colloquia sponsored by the Kinder Forum and a preview of Park’s current book project, explored late eighteenth-century American conceptions of political belonging and national culture. Dr. Park drew on a wide variety of source material–from serialized newspaper essays to allegorical paintings–to shed light on both the ingenuity and anxiety that came with the task of facilitating national unification, focusing specifically on how the vision of a government that mirrored the character of the governed quickly gave way to a widespread fear that the cultural disparateness of the member states might preclude the possibility of their forming a union. A lively Q&A and reception on the town followed the lecture.

The second history colloquium will take place Friday, October 17, 2014, in Gentry Hall Room 325. Kinder Postdoctoral Fellow Armin Mattes will give a talk entitled, “We may give to this influence what name we please”: Friendship, Corruption and the Transformation of Patronage in America, 1750-1850.