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Book Series
January 11, 2022
A Fire Bell in the Past, Volume II: “The Missouri Question” and Its Answers
Many new states entered the United States around 200 years ago, but only Missouri almost killed the nation it was trying to join. When the House of Representatives passed the Tallmadge Amendment banning slavery from the prospective new state in February 1819, it set off a two-year political crisis in which growing northern antislavery sentiment […]
June 4, 2021
Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819-1821
The admission of Missouri to the Union quickly became a constitutional crisis of the first order, inciting an intensive reexamination of the U.S. Constitution by the U.S. Congress. The heart of the question in need of resolution was whether that body possessed the authority to place conditions on a territory—in this instance Missouri—regarding restrictions on […]
June 4, 2021
A Fire Bell in the Past, The Missouri Crisis at 200: Vol 1, Western Slavery, National Impasse
Many of the original essays in this volume began as papers presented at an international conference sponsored by the Missouri Humanities Council and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, A Fire-Bell in the Past: Re-assessing the Missouri Crisis at 200, held at the University of Missouri at Columbia on February 15-16, 2019. In an attempt […]
January 1, 2020
The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783-1840
The Federalist Frontier traces the development of Federalist policies and the Federalist Party in the first three states of the Northwest Territory—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—from the nation’s first years until the rise of the Second Party System in the 1820s and 1830s. Relying on government records, private correspondence, and newspapers, Kristopher Maulden argues that Federalists originated […]
November 1, 2019
Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833
On May 10, 1776, the Second Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia adopted a Resolution which set in motion a round of constitution making in the colonies, several of which soon declared themselves sovereign states and severed all remaining ties to the British Crown. In forming these written constitutions, the delegates to the state conventions were […]
April 1, 2019
The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression
The Panic of 1819 tells the story of the first nationwide economic collapse to strike the United States. Much more than a banking crisis or real estate bubble, the Panic was the culmination of an economic wave that rolled through the United States, forming before the War of 1812, cresting with the land and cotton boom […]