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Though his October 15 talk at MU, the first in a series of Oxford Exchange Lectures organized by the Kinder Institute, began and ended with the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, St. Catherine’s College Rhodes Chair in American History Pekka Hämäläinen stressed that understanding the significance of this historical touchstone requires tracing the Lakota’s movement […]

The driving question behind Political Science Prof. Jay Dow’s current research—when did the United States become a recognizably electoral democracy?—is one for which history and government textbooks have long had a readymade answer: the dawn of the Jacksonian era. As he showed in his October 11 presentation of this research, however, the problem with the […]

The school to prison pipeline has been studied and publicly discussed with much vigor in recent years, and rightfully so, as scholars and advocates have done important work exposing the disproportionate and lasting ways in which school policies like zero tolerance negatively affect young Black males. However, in setting up his September 27 presentation at […]

Back for an encore re-telling of the U.S. constitutional backstory (he gave a Valentine’s Day 2019 talk on this subject at the Kinder Institute), Stanford Assistant Professor of History Jonathan Gienapp focused this time around on two figures from the 1787 Convention whose contributions to the drafting of the Constitution have largely been forgotten: James […]

Culture being, as Raymond Williams described it, “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” tracking its transfer is a somewhat elusive proposition. Be that as it may, Vanderbilt University Distinguished Professor and Chair of History David Blackbourn made clear in his September 6 talk at the Kinder Institute that […]

Though he’s frequently credited with being its first utterer, Jefferson did not, in fact, introduce “that government is best which governs least” into the public (and, following that, the bumper sticker) lexicon. What he actually said, in a 1788 letter to William Stephens Smith, was far more poetic and nuanced: “we are now vibrating between […]