Over at CNN, Zachary Wolf interviews Andrew Jackson scholar Daniel Feller on comparisons on the “spoils system.” Here is a taste: WOLF: You’ve written extensively about the spoils system. How would you describe it to Americans today? FELLER: It is a system […]
19th century
What the Emancipation Proclamation did
The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863. It was an executive order stating that all enslaved people in the rebellious states were free and would be recognized and maintained as such by the Union government. Here is […]
Listen to the earliest known country music recording
Here is Geoff Edgers at The Washington Post: John Levin had no idea what he’d stumbled upon at first. About 10 years ago, the collector paid about $100 for a box of wax cylinders at an auction in Pennsylvania coal […]
The Author’s Corner with Caroline Winterer
Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor by courtesy of Classics at Stanford University. This interview is based on her new book, How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in […]
The Author’s Corner with Peter Kolchin
Peter Kolchin is Reed Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware. This interview is based on his new book, Emancipation: The Abolition and Aftermath of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Yale University Press, 2024). JF: What led you […]
The Author’s Corner with Aaron W. Marrs
Aaron W. Marrs is on the staff of the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State. This interview is based on his new book, The American Transportation Revolution: A Social and Cultural History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024). […]
The Author’s Corner with Jennifer M. Black
Jennifer M. Black is Associate Professor and Program Director of History at Misericordia University. This interview is based on her new book, Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). JF: What led you to […]
The Author’s Corner with Catherine McNeur
Catherine McNeur is Associate Professor of History at Portland State University. This interview is based on her new book, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science (Basic Books, 2023). JF: What led you to write Mischievous Creatures? […]
Edward Garrison Draper is admitted to the Maryland bar
His admission came 166 years after he first applied to the bar and was denied. Here is Sydney Trent at The Washington Post: Edward Garrison Draper was more prepared to be a lawyer than most White attorneys in the mid-19th […]
“Anything that wasn’t stale tea party table talk was permitted”
Last week I asked college students to consider forming a Junto. I used the Boston Gleaning Circle as an example of such a community of mutual improvement. And today over at Zocalo Public Sqaure, writer Emily Zarevich introduces us to […]
Ann Sprigg’s boarding house and the end of slavery
Here is historian Bennett Parten at Zocalo Public Square: In the early 1840s, where the steps of the Library of Congress now stand, a group of American abolitionists gathered in a modest boardinghouse to plot the destruction of slavery. The […]