Jacksonian-era newspapers provide an opportunity to examine not only traditional politics, such as candidates’ perspectives on issues and party platforms, but also the more informal politics of the period. One such example of cultural politics, as these informal expressions are known, is women’s inclusion in presidential campaigns. While some scholars...
Digital Scholarship
Envisaging Freedom on the Eve of Emancipation: The British Caribbean, 1833-1834
When the British colonial secretary Edward Stanley in May 1833 introduced the resolution for emancipation in Parliament, he referred to it as a “mighty experiment.” A year later on August 1, 1834, as 800,000 slaves were freed throughout parts of the British Empire, most of them in the Caribbean, emancipation...
Antebellum America’s Galvanizing Issue: The Tariff
For the past 50 years few Americans discussed tariffs. That has changed in the past two years. During his presidential campaign of 2016, Donald Trump hinted that he would impose tariffs in order to revitalize manufacturing in the United States. From the stump, Trump assailed the North American Free Trade...
Black Freethought from Slavery to Civil Rights: Atheism and Agnosticism in African American Cultural and Intellectual Life
In his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass asserted that throughout his life his religious views “pass[ed] over the whole scale and circle of belief and unbelief, from faith in the overruling Providence of God, to the blackest atheism.”[1] The point at which he was most skeptical...
Fields of Fire and Frost: The Battle of Chickamauga and Weather in Early American Newspapers
On September 17, 1863, two armies shifted into position along northwest Georgia’s Chickamauga Creek. Since late June, Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans’ Union Army of the Cumberland had shoved Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee to the southeast. Weather conditions for men in the field had been hot and...