Jeffrey Lingan Pasley (born February 27, 1964) is a professor of American history at the University of Missouri, specializing in the Early Republic.
He is the oldest son of John Pasley, a former civil engineer and local public official.
Pasley spent most of his childhood in Topeka, Kansas, graduating from Washburn Rural High School in 1982. He graduated from Carleton College, a liberal-arts school in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1986. After graduating, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked on the staff of Al Gore's attempted campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1988 election, [1] during much of 1986 and 1987. Throughout the same period, he also contributed articles for The New Republic , a liberal political commentary magazine. [1]
Pasley completed graduate school at Harvard University in 1993 with a Ph.D. He taught at Florida State University from 1993 to 1999 before beginning his current tenure at the University of Missouri later in 1999. Pasley's research focuses on American political culture between the American Revolution and the Civil War. [1] In addition, Pasley has taught classes on the United States during the Cold War, especially in the field of popular conspiracy theories. [2]
His 2001 book The Tyranny of Printers showed that many early professional politicians in the U.S. were newspaper printers and editors, based upon "well-crafted biographical accounts of critical figures". [3] A later work, The First Presidential Contest (2013) was described as "A superb, important book. Likely to become the definitive study of the 1796 election." [4] "The importance of this book" lay in setting the election in the wider political context of the time. [5]
In a 2015 interview with Vox Magazine (an arm of the Columbia Missourian newspaper), Pasley talked about the role of comic books in reflecting the social political climate of the time in postwar America. [6]
The Republican Party, known retroactively as the Democratic-Republican Party, was an American political party founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the early 1790s. It championed liberalism, republicanism, individual liberty, equal rights, decentralization, free markets, free trade, and agrarianism. In foreign policy it was hostile to Great Britain and in sympathy with the French Revolution. The party became increasingly dominant after the 1800 elections as the opposing Federalist Party collapsed.
The Federalist Party was a conservative and nationalist American political party and the first political party in the United States. It dominated the national government under Alexander Hamilton from 1789 to 1801. The party was defeated by the Democratic-Republican Party in 1800, and it became a minority party while keeping its stronghold in New England. It made a brief resurgence by opposing the War of 1812, then collapsed with its last presidential candidate in 1816. Remnants lasted for a few years afterwards.
The 1796 United States presidential election was the third quadrennial presidential election of the United States. It was held from Friday, November 4 to Wednesday, December 7, 1796. It was the first contested American presidential election, the first presidential election in which political parties played a dominant role, and the only presidential election in which a president and vice president were elected from opposing tickets. Incumbent vice president John Adams of the Federalist Party defeated former secretary of state Thomas Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party.
The Midwestern United States is one of the four census regions defined by the United States Census Bureau. It occupies the northern central part of the United States. It was officially named the North Central Region by the U.S. Census Bureau until 1984. It is between the Northeastern United States and the Western United States, with Canada to the north and the Southern United States to the south.
Thomas Pinckney was an American statesman, diplomat, and military officer who fought in both the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, achieving the rank of major general. He served as Governor of South Carolina and as the U.S. minister to Great Britain.
John Peter Zenger (October 26, 1697 – July 28, 1746) was a German printer and journalist in New York City. Zenger printed The New York Weekly Journal. He was accused of libel in 1734 by William Cosby, the royal governor of New York, but the jury acquitted Zenger, who became a symbol for freedom of the press.
Jeffersonian democracy, named after its advocate Thomas Jefferson, was one of two dominant political outlooks and movements in the United States from the 1790s to the 1820s. The Jeffersonians were deeply committed to American republicanism, which meant opposition to what they considered to be artificial aristocracy, opposition to corruption, and insistence on virtue, with a priority for the "yeoman farmer", "planters", and the "plain folk". They were antagonistic to the aristocratic elitism of merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, distrusted factory workers, and strongly opposed and were on the watch for supporters of the Westminster system.
Bernard Bailyn was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice. In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture. He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal.
John Norvell was a newspaper editor and one of the first U.S. Senators from Michigan.
William Loughton Smith was an American lawyer, politician, and diplomat from Charleston, South Carolina. He represented South Carolina as a Federalist in the United States House of Representatives from 1789 until 1797, during which time he served as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means.
The First Party System was the political party system in the United States between roughly 1792 and 1824. It featured two national parties competing for control of the presidency, Congress, and the states: the Federalist Party, created largely by Alexander Hamilton, and the rival Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, usually called at the time the Republican Party.
Journalism in the United States began humbly and became a political force in the campaign for American independence. Following independence, the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The American press grew rapidly following the American Revolution. The press became a key support element to the country's political parties, but also for organized religious institutions.
The presidency of John Adams, began on March 4, 1797, when John Adams was inaugurated as the second president of the United States, and ended on March 4, 1801. Adams, who had served as vice president under George Washington, took office as president after winning the 1796 presidential election. The only member of the Federalist Party to ever serve as president, his presidency ended after a single term following his defeat in the 1800 presidential election. He was succeeded by Thomas Jefferson of the opposition Democratic-Republican Party.
The Gazette of the United States was an early American newspaper, first issued semiweekly in New York on April 15, 1789, but moving the next year to Philadelphia when the nation's capital moved there the next year. It was friendly to the Federalist Party. Its founder, John Fenno, intended it to unify the country under its new government. As the leading Federalist newspaper of its time, it praised the Washington and Adams administrations and their policies. Its Federalist sponsors, chiefly Alexander Hamilton, granted it substantial funding; because some of it was directly from the government, the Gazette is considered to have been semi-official. The influence of the newspaper inspired the creation of the National Gazette and the Philadelphia Aurora, rival newspapers for the Democratic-Republicans.
Michael Nelson is an American political scientist, noted for his work on the Presidency and elections. He is a Fulmer Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
Charles Henry James Taylor (1857–1899), was an American journalist, editor, lawyer, orator, and political organizer. An early supporter of Democratic President Grover Cleveland, he was appointed Minister to Liberia during Cleveland's first presidential term.
The Pittsburgh Mercury was a weekly newspaper published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1811 to the early 1840s. Originally almost unpartisan, it became a mouthpiece of the Democratic-Republicans, and later of the Jacksonians and Democrats. It was a progenitor of the Pittsburgh Post, which in turn was succeeded by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Mass media and American politics covers the role of newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and social media from the colonial era to the present.
Bengal Journal was a newspaper founded in 1785 by William Duane and Thomas Jones.
Conspiracy theories in United States politics are beliefs that a major political situation is the result of secretive collusion by powerful people striving to harm a rival group or undermine society in general.