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The great fallacy of scholarship on the origins of American politics, Franklin & Marshall Professor of History Van Gosse noted in opening his October 15 colloquium at the Kinder Institute, is the idea that, at the time of the founding, only propertied white men could vote. No! In New Jersey, for example, women could vote […]

Making a return visit to Columbia, after being one of the Kinder Forum’s first speakers back in Fall 2014, University of Iowa Professor Colin Gordon used his October 8 colloquium on the fourth floor of Jesse Hall to introduce the next phase of his research on the history of racial segregation in Greater St. Louis. […]

If social science theories often try to flatten ambiguities in political identity, the subject of Kinder Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Tara Ginnane’s September 24th talk—the rise of American external voting policy and the new ideas about national membership and belonging that came with it—allows these ambiguities room to take on appropriate significance. The ‘American’ designation for […]

Mizzou undergraduates of any major can examine the history and legacies of racialized rule in South Africa through HIST/CNST_DEM/BL_STU 4835: Race & Politics in South Africa, a three-credit hour class that includes an intersession study abroad component hosted at University of the Western Cape, in Cape Town, from January 5 – January 15, 2022, that […]

In describing the book from which his Constitution Day lecture took its title, Claremont McKenna Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions George Thomas noted that his October 2021 Oxford University Press monograph was not composed with a strong position on the Constitution in mind. Instead, by taking a more conceptual or empirical perspective, his goal, […]

Before taking her new post at University of Edinburgh, Prof. Sonia Tycko, the Kinder Institute’s inaugural Junior Research Fellow at Oxford, paid a final visit to Columbia to present her research on coercion and contract labor in, as she described it, the England of Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, and Hobbes. We began in a 17th-century courtroom […]