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The question of how historians should conceptualize the role individual agency plays in history was at the heart of the Kinder Institute and Novak Leadership Institute’s co-sponsored March 2 lecture, delivered by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Fredrik Logevall. In the past two […]

In his January 29 talk at the Kinder Institute, Dr. Michael Joseph, Brock Fellow in Modern History at Corpus Christi College (Oxford), took his listeners to a part of world history that few venture into: the Caribbean during the Great War. While there has been a recent surge amongst historians to discuss the first world […]

When it comes to the question of how favorable the U.S. Constitution was to the institution of slavery—and of the motivations of the founding generation on this subject, in general—two scholarly camps have formed. On one hand, there are neo-Garrisonians, partisans of 1619 who interpret the Constitution as directly (see: Fugitive Slave Clause) and indirectly […]

With political bandwidth in the U.S. more and more consumed by tribal warfare, the perspectives of the American public and American leaders alike have become rigidly, problematically domestic. As Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair in Constitutional Democracy Jay Sexton noted in introducing the March 5 panel of scholars he convened and moderated, this lack of […]

Some key stories in the national narrative have become so familiar, RAI Senior Fellow Donald Ratcliffe argued in introducing his February 26 colloquium at the Kinder Institute, that our telling of them reflects not historical knowledge but gaps therein, not understanding but a perversion thereof. The Missouri Compromise is a prime example of this phenomenon, […]

In May of 1848, John Jones, a Chicago tailor, real estate owner, and vocal advocate for racial justice, sent a letter to New Hampshire Senator and congressional anti-slavery up-and-comer John Hale inquiring about the odds that his state suit petitioning for full rights as a citizen of Illinois might reach the Supreme Court. While the […]