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There are any number of contradictions that can trace their roots back to the Espionage Act. It’s the final legal backstop propping up America’s secrecy regime, yet it’s repeatedly been at the center of the crises of legitimacy this regime has faced over time (for recent examples, see: Trump/Mar-a-Lago, Biden/Garage, Clinton/Server). In the 21st century […]

As an undergraduate, Paul Odu did more or less everything that the Kinder Institute offers Mizzou students. He was in the Society of Fellows and wrote for the Journal on Constitutional Democracy; he studied in D.C. as a member of the Kinder Scholars Program and at Corpus Christi College as our 2021-22 Oxford Fellow; he […]

Views on the history of the American West have shifted drastically, and importantly, in recent decades. What was once a celebration of destiny manifested has become an indictment of ruthless expansion. The language of social progress, political democracy, and economic development has been replaced by ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, and genocide. Brutal fact, in other […]

It’s with great pleasure that we get to announce that Sam Franks, an inaugural member of the Society of Fellows, Kinder Scholars D.C. Summer Program, and Kinder Institute Alumni Council, and a graduate of University of Michigan Law School, was one of 14 graduate students and early-career professional practitioners chosen to take part in the […]

Representing the full diversity of the Depression-era working class, UCAPAWA—United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers—faced an uphill battle from the very start. On balance, their constituents were unappealing candidates for unionization: poorly and irregularly paid and rarely in one place for long, making dues collection difficult. Compounding this was that many lived under racialized […]

While Penn State McCabe Greer Professor of History Christina Snyder’s April 14 talk at the Kinder Institute would eventually get to the Pacific Northwest, it began along the banks of the Red River in what is now Oklahoma, where Wallace and Minerva Burton were enslaved by a Chickasaw woman who leased them to the Choctaw […]