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May 10, 2022
RECAP: “City of Refuge: Evidence of an 18th-Century Great Dismal Swamp Slave Labor Camp,” Inlands Kickoff w/ URI Prof. Marcus Nevius
In 1763, a group of mid-Atlantic enslavers including George Washington dispatched 54 enslaved persons to a 2,000-square mile plot of land that spanned the Virginia-North Carolina border known as the Great Dismal Swamp. As University of Rhode Island Associate Prof. of History Marcus Nevius explored throughout his April 20 talk in Jesse 410, an unofficial […]
May 6, 2022
Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain
A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. This is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, […]
March 31, 2022
RECAP: “Thoughts on the World, the Political, and the Black,” Colloquium with Brown University Prof. Ainsley LeSure
Are politics inimical to Black life? That was the question that concluded the abstract for Brown University political theorist Ainsley LeSure’s March 18 talk at the Kinder Institute, which she began by placing her work in conversation with those in the field of Black Studies who would answer this question, ‘yes.’ At its core, the […]
March 18, 2022
RECAP: “Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy,” Colloquium with Brown University Historian Christopher Grasso
In the introduction to his 2021 biography of John R. Kelso, Brown University historian Christopher Grasso describes his subject as possessing Whitman-like multiplicity. As Prof. Grasso’s March 11 talk at the Kinder Institute made abundantly clear, as capacious as Whitman was, this introduction might still be an understatement. Born in a backwoods cabin in Southwest […]
March 6, 2022
Demagogues in American Politics
Most of us think that demagoguery is, by definition, bad. Relatedly, scholars almost invariably treat demagoguery as a divisive practice that appeals to what is worst in an audience at the expense of what is best for the public good. In Demagogues in American Politics, Charles U. Zug offers a historical analysis of the role of […]
March 6, 2022
The Cambridge History of America and the World, Vol. II (1820-1900)
The second volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States rose to great power status in the nineteenth century and how the rest of the world has shaped the United States. Mixing top-down and bottom-up perspectives, insider and outsider views, cultural, social, political, military, environmental, legal, technological, and […]