"State and Landscape": MRSEAH meeting with University of Missouri-St. Louis Professor David Robertson

The first Spring 2016 meeting of the Missouri Regional Seminar on Early American History was held on February 19, 2016, at Cardwell’s in Clayton, MO. Faculty and graduate students from University of Missouri, Washington University, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, Southeast Missouri State University, University of Illinois-Springfield, and St. Louis University gathered to discuss University of Missouri-St. Louis Curators’ Teaching Professor and Political Science Department Chair David Robertson’s forthcoming work on the evolution of land governance in America from the founding of the colonies through the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

Please check the Kinder Institute website in mid-March for details regarding the final MRSEAH meeting of 2015-2016, which will take place Friday, April 8 at the Broadway Hotel in Columbia. Discussion of “‘An apt emblem’: Natural Sciences and Devotion among the Laity in the Early Republic,” a book chapter by History Prof. Lily Santoro (Southeast Missouri State), will be followed by a lecture delivered by Washington University Professor of English Abram Van Engen, entitled “Missionary Impulses and Historical Societies: The Political Theology of American History in the Early Republic.”

David Robertson received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Indiana University, and since 2008, he has served as University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at University of Missouri-St. Louis. Prof. Robertson is the author of Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for American Labor Markets from the Civil War to the New Deal (Rowan and Littlefield, 2000); The Constitution and America’s Destiny (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Federalism and the Making of America (Routledge, 2011); and, most recently, The Original Compromise: What the Constitution’s Framers Were Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has published articles in American Political Science Review, Studies in American Political Development, and Polity, among many other places, and he currently serves as Associate Editor at the Journal of Public Policy. He also served as a Fulbright Specialist in American Studies in Colombia, and he is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled, State, Landscape, and Market: Origins of American Environmental Governance. At UMSL, Prof. Robertson regularly teachers courses on environmental history, the American presidency, federalism and American political development, and political economy and public policy.