News, Media & Publications

In describing the book from which his Constitution Day lecture took its title, Claremont McKenna Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions George Thomas noted that his October 2021 Oxford University Press monograph was not composed with a strong position on the Constitution in mind. Instead, by taking a more conceptual or empirical perspective, his goal, […]

Before taking her new post at University of Edinburgh, Prof. Sonia Tycko, the Kinder Institute’s inaugural Junior Research Fellow at Oxford, paid a final visit to Columbia to present her research on coercion and contract labor in, as she described it, the England of Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, and Hobbes. We began in a 17th-century courtroom […]

In the early nineteenth century, the Shawnee Trail conveyed cattle from Texas pasture-lands to Missouri railheads and thence the nation. Drawing on this spirit of regional connections and networks of exchange, the Shawnee Trail Conference was launched in 2015 as a way for scholars throughout the Midwest to share their research on topics related to […]

If we place its origins in the 1790s, with Jefferson and Madison’s forging of the Democratic-Republican Party, there can be little argument that what we now know simply by the first half of its old moniker is, in fact, the nation’s oldest mass partisan institution. As Eastern Connecticut Associate Professor of History Thomas Balcerski noted […]

For news on everything from our semester-opening colloquium on “When Democrats Were Conservatives,” through the Cambridge History of America & the World book launch that we’ll end the term with, use the link below to download a copy of our Fall 2021 events calendar. Fall 2021 Kinder Institute Events Calendar Follow us on Facebook, @constitutionaldemocracy, […]

As a final project for the Oxford leg of the M.A. in Atlantic History & Politics, Riley Messer produced the first—and we hope not the only—episode of her “Strange History” podcast, exploring how cannibalism was important, among other things, to the formation of Atlantic identities, to the establishment of racial hierarchies, and to reckoning with […]