First Fall MRSEAH Meeting with CUNY-Graduate Center Professor David Waldstreicher

The Kinder Institute held its first 2015-16 meeting of the Missouri Regional Seminar on Early American History on Friday, September 11, 2015, at the Broadway Hotel in downtown Columbia. Attendees from across the Midwest gathered to discuss “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Amistad: John Quincy Adams, the Shutdown, and the Restart of Antislavery Politics, 1787-1836,” a recent article by City University of New York Distinguished Professor of History David Waldstreicher, which uses the sixth president as the centerpiece of an examination of the shifting rhetoric and reality of the politics of slavery in the period of American history from the ratification of the Constitution through the 1836 Gag Rule debates. Participants in the first MRSEAH meeting included professors and graduate students from the University of Missouri-Columbia Departments of History, Political Science, and Black Studies, as well as scholars from Washington University in St. Louis, University of Central Missouri, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Moberly Area Community College, and University of Illinois-Springfield.

The second fall 2015 meeting of the MRSEAH will be held at Café Napoli in Clayton, MO, on October 30. Participants will discuss “The Sons of Liberty and the Making of Modern Social Movements,” a chapter from University of Central Missouri Assistant Professor of History Micah Alpaugh’s current book project. Invitations to the October 30 MRSEAH, as well as a copy of Prof. Alpaugh’s chapter, will be circulated shortly. For any questions about the next MRSEAH meeting, please contact Kinder Institute Communications Associate Thomas Kane (KaneTC@missouri.edu).

David Waldstreicher received his B.A. in History and English Literature from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Prof. Waldstreicher is the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (Hill and Wang, 2009); Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Hill and Wang, 2004); and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820, which was published in 1997 by University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and which won the Jamestown Foundation Prize for best first book manuscript. In addition, he has edited or co-edited a number of collections, including The Struggle Against Slavery: A History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (UNC Press, 2004), with Kinder Institute co-director Jeff Pasley and Andrew Robertson of the CUNY Graduate Center. Prof. Waldstreicher has contributed recent articles to American Political Thought, Rutgers Law Journal, William & Mary Quarterly, and Early American Studies, and he is co-editor of the University of Pennsylvania Press’ Early American Studies book series. He has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute, among other places, and prior to his current position at the CUNY Graduate Center, he was Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia.