Jonathan H. Earle | |
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![]() Dean Jonathan Earle speaks at the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College Convocation in August 2017. | |
Academic background | |
Education | |
Academic work | |
Discipline | American history |
Institutions |
Jonathan H. Earle is an author,historian,professor,and dean. He is an historian of American politics and culture who focuses on the early republic and antebellum periods,especially the antislavery movement and the sectional crisis leading up to the Civil War. Currently Earle serves as Dean of the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College at Louisiana State University,a post he has held since 2014.
A native of suburban Washington,D.C.,Earle is a specialist in the history of the antebellum United States. Earle was educated at Columbia (BA History) and Princeton (MA,Ph.D U.S. History) Universities. [1]
Earle entered the University of Kansas in 1997,where he taught as a longtime faculty member in the Department of History. During his time at Kansas he served as the Associate Director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics between 2003–2010. In 2013,Earle was named director of the University Honors Program at Kansas,where he served until 2014. [2] [3] [4] Since 2014 Earle has been Dean of the LSU Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College. Under his leadership,the Ogden Honors College received a $12 million naming gift from New Orleans philanthropist Roger Ogden,fully renovated the French House —the historic building at the center of LSU's campus which houses the College's classroom,advising,staff,and co-curricular spaces —and,in partnership with LSU's provost and president,greatly increased the university's financial and academic commitment to honors education. [5] [6]
He is the author of numerous books and articles including Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil (UNC Press,2004),John Brown's Raid:A Brief History With Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's Press,2008),The Routledge Atlas of African American History (Routledge,2000),and co-author of Major Problems in the Early American Republic (Cengage,2007). [7] [8] [9] Earle is the recipient of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic's 2005 Broussard prize and co-winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize. In 2013,the University Press of Kansas published his edited collection Bleeding Kansas,Bleeding Missouri:The Long Civil War on the Border,which was named a Notable Book by the Kansas State Library. [10]
In the Spring semester of 2017 Earle co-taught an Honors seminar course at LSU titled "272 Slaves:Discovering Louisiana's (And Georgetown's) Past" with Jennifer Cramer,director of the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History with the LSU library. [11] The course covered the complex history of slavery in the United States,with a special focus on the Louisiana descendants of a group of 272 slaves sold in 1838 by the Jesuit Maryland Province. A parallel course was taught at Georgetown University,granting students from both universities the opportunity to discuss shared readings over Skype. The course gained prominent local and national coverage. [11] [12] [13]
Earle is currently working on a book on the election of 1860 for the Pivotal Moments in U.S. History Series published by Oxford University Press. [2] [14]
In support of his research,Earle has received major fellowships from the NEH and the American Council of Learned Societies. [15] He spent the 2006–2007 academic year as the Ray Allen Billington Chair in U.S. History at Occidental College and the Huntington Library and the 1999–2000 academic year as an NEH Fellow at the Huntington. [16] [17] Earle has appeared on numerous programs and documentaries on the History Channel,C-SPAN,and PBS. [18] [19] The History News Network named him a Top Young Historian in 2007. [20]
Lecompton is a city in Douglas County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the population was 625.
The Free Soil Party was a short-lived coalition political party in the United States active from 1848 to 1854, when it merged into the Republican Party. The party was largely focused on the single issue of opposing the expansion of slavery into the western territories of the United States.
Historians who debate the origins of the American Civil War focus on the reasons that seven Southern states declared their secession from the United States and united to form the Confederate States, and the reasons that the North refused to let them go. Proponents of the pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology have denied that slavery was the principal cause of the secession. While historians in the 21st century agree on the centrality of the conflict over slavery—it was not just "a cause" of the war but "the cause"—they disagree sharply on which aspects of this conflict were most important.
Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory, and to a lesser extent in western Missouri, between 1854 and 1859. It emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were not. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 specifically stated that a slave did not become free by entering a free state.
Border ruffians were proslavery raiders, crossing from the slave state of Missouri into the Kansas Territory, to help ensure Kansas entered the Union as a slave state. They were a key part of the violent period called Bleeding Kansas, that peaked from 1854 to 1858. Their crimes included fraudulent voting, interference with elections, and raiding, intimidating, and destroying property of "Free-State" (anti-slavery) settlers. Some took pride in their criminal reputation. Many became pro-Confederate guerrillas, or bushwhackers.
The sacking of Lawrence occurred on May 21, 1856, when pro-slavery settlers, led by Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones, attacked and ransacked Lawrence, Kansas, a town which had been founded by anti-slavery settlers from Massachusetts who were hoping to make Kansas a free state. The incident fueled the irregular conflict in Kansas Territory that later became known as Bleeding Kansas.
The New England Emigrant Aid Company was a transportation company founded in Boston, Massachusetts by activist Eli Thayer in the wake of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed the population of Kansas Territory to choose whether slavery would be legal. The Company's ultimate purpose was to transport anti-slavery immigrants into the Kansas Territory. The Company believed that if enough anti-slavery immigrants settled en masse in the newly-opened territory, they would be able to shift the balance of political power in the territory, which in turn would lead to Kansas becoming a free state when it eventually joined the United States. The New England Emigrant Aid Company is noted less for its direct impact than for the psychological impact it had on pro-slavery and anti-slavery elements. Thayer's prediction that the Company would eventually be able to send 20,000 immigrants a year never came to fruition, but it spurred Border Ruffians from nearby Missouri, where slavery was legal, to move to Kansas to ensure its admission to the Union as a slave state. That, in turn, further galvanized Free-Staters and enemies of Slave Power.
The Kansas Jayhawks, commonly referred to as simply KU or Kansas, are the athletic teams that represent the University of Kansas. KU is one of three schools in the state of Kansas that participate in NCAA Division I. The Jayhawks are also a member of the Big 12 Conference. KU athletic teams have won twelve NCAA Division I championships: four in men's basketball, one in men's cross country, three in men's indoor track and field, three in men's outdoor track and field, and one in women's outdoor track and field.
Eli Thayer was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1857 to 1861. He was born in Mendon, Massachusetts. He graduated from Worcester Academy in 1840, from Brown University in 1845, and in 1848 founded Oread Institute, a school for young women in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is buried at Hope Cemetery, Worcester.
The Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College is an academic community at Louisiana State University. Housed in the heritage-listed French House, it was founded in 1992 as the LSU Honors College, and renamed in December 2014. The college primarily admits the top 10% of incoming LSU freshmen, and provides its students with a curriculum of seminar classes, mentoring relationships with faculty, and opportunities for undergraduate research, culminating in the Honors Thesis.
The Slave Power, or Slavocracy, referred to the perceived political power in the U.S. federal government held by slave owners during the 1840s and 1850s, prior to the Civil War. Antislavery campaigners, led by Frederick Douglass, during this period bitterly decried what they saw as disproportionate and corrupt influence wielded by wealthy Southerners. The argument was that this small group of rich slave owners had seized political control of their own states and were trying to take over the federal government in an illegitimate fashion in order to expand and protect slavery. The argument was later widely used by the Republican Party that formed in 1854–55 to oppose the expansion of slavery.
Free-Staters was the name given to settlers in Kansas Territory during the "Bleeding Kansas" period in the 1850s who opposed the expansion of slavery. The name derives from the term "free state", that is, a U.S. state without slavery. Many of the "free-staters" joined the Jayhawkers in their fight against slavery and to make Kansas a free state.
The Battle of Black Jack took place on June 2, 1856, when antislavery forces, led by the noted abolitionist John Brown, attacked the encampment of Henry C. Pate near Baldwin City, Kansas. The battle is cited as one incident of "Bleeding Kansas" and a contributing factor leading up to the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865.
Lewis Tappan was a New York abolitionist who worked to achieve freedom for the enslaved Africans aboard the Amistad. Tappan was also among the founders of the American Missionary Association in 1846, which began more than 100 anti-slavery Congregational churches throughout the Midwest, and after the American Civil War, founded numerous schools and colleges to aid in the education of freedmen.
Owen Brown, father of abolitionist John Brown, was a wealthy cattle breeder and land speculator who operated a successful tannery in Hudson, Ohio. He was also a stout and outspoken abolitionist and civil servant. Brown was a founder of multiple institutions including the Western Reserve Anti-Slavery Society, Western Reserve College, and the Free Congressional Church. Brown gave speeches advocating the immediate abolition of slavery and facilitated the Underground Railroad.
Allen Carl Guelzo is an American historian who serves as Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He formerly was a professor of History at Gettysburg College.
Bell Irvin Wiley was an American historian who specialized in the American Civil War and was an authority on military history and the social history of common people. He died in Atlanta, Georgia, from a heart attack.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In the 1856 Chicago mayoral election, Thomas Dyer defeated former mayor Francis Cornwall Sherman. The race was shaped by the divisive national political debate surrounding the issue of slavery, particularly debate surrounding the controversial Kansas–Nebraska Act, and the election was treated by many as a referendum on it. Dyer vocally supported the act, while Sherman stood in opposition to it.