News, Media & Publications

The Pacific Northwest, where Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow Ken Owen geographically began, embodies the two major takeaways from his May 1 Zoom colloquium: that secession is entrenched in the American political story and that it’s nearly impossible to singularly characterize the motivations behind secession movements. As to the former, almost as soon as the boundaries […]

The story of Faramola Shonekan’s journey to becoming Mizzou’s 2020 Mark Twain Fellow has already been told in a couple different places. MU’s Fellowships Office did a wonderful write-up about April 28th’s surprise announcement (hat-tip to our own Jay Sexton for helping pull off the ruse), and Columbia’s local paper covered her exceptional undergraduate career […]

The manic depressive “end of history” rhetoric that inevitably arrives in lockstep with crisis is, Kinder Institute Associate Director Jeff Pasley pointed out in kicking off the April 24 panel on “Disease Control in History,” something that can (or at least should) be easily tempered by showing how, in similar times, history hasn’t actually ended. […]

Talking about the constitutional origins of the president’s cabinet comes by necessity with a wink and a nod, White House Historical Association Historian Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky noted in opening her April 17 colloquium presentation, since the institution we’ve all grown so accustomed to isn’t officially mentioned in the nation’s charter. That said, variations on […]

City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave’s economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp’s remote sectors and […]

Americans valorize resistance to conformity. “Be yourself!” “Don’t just follow the crowd!” Such injunctions pervade contemporary American culture. We praise individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Steve Jobs who chart their own course in life and do something new. Yet surprisingly, recent research in social psychology has shown that, in practice, Americans are […]