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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 […]

The short answer to the question at the heart of University of Wisconsin Edwards Professor of American Politics Ryan Owens’ February 28 colloquium at the Kinder Institute is, quite simply, ‘yes’: In a way that we should probably expect, cognitive aging does impact the faculties of judges in ways similar to everyone else. Attention and […]

Applications are now open for the Kinder Institute’s next undergraduate Oxford Fellow, who will spend the entire 2020-21 academic year as a fully embedded second-year student of history at Corpus Christi College. All rising juniors and seniors at Mizzou who have demonstrated exceptional aptitude for the study of history are eligible to apply, and program […]

When then-aspiring politician James Sidney Rollins gave a July 4, 1834, public speech on the importance of education, he must have known that he was preaching to the choir. The state’s Whig-leaning population was open in its belief that an informed citizenry would benefit both civic and economic life in Missouri, and when Rollins reached […]

At first blush, the initial question posed in Kinder Institute Postdoc Erin Marie Holmes’ February 14 colloquium—“how do we recover the lost 18th-century landscape and built environment?”—seems like an insurmountable obstacle. Especially given limited scholarship on the subject, scanty documentary record, and a sometimes counter-productive disciplinary divide within the academy, it would seem that a […]