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Publications
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
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 […]
June 7, 2020
Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865
Following the creation of the United States, profound disagreements remained over how to secure the survival of the republic and unite its diverse population. In this pathbreaking account, Billy Coleman uses the history of American music to illuminate the relationship between elite power and the people from the early national period to the Civil War. […]
January 13, 2020
Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain
Weaving U.S. history into the larger fabric of world history, the contributors to Crossing Empires de-exceptionalize the American empire, placing it in a global transimperial context. They draw attention to the breadth of U.S. entanglements with other empires to illuminate the scope and nature of American global power as it reached from the Bering Sea to Australia […]
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 […]
March 1, 2019
The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History
Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Prof. Carli N. Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety […]