Mellon Foundation Grant at USC for “Civic Engagement, Voting Rights, and the Founding Documents at the University of South Carolina”
Beginning in fall 2023, the Humanities Collaborative will enhance its research and teaching of America’s founding documents through a new $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities.
Holly Crocker, director of the Humanities Collaborative, sought the grant, titled “Civic Engagement, Voting Rights, and the Founding Documents at the University of South Carolina,” to enrich the research and teaching related to the founding documents courses. Crocker and the associate director of the Collaborative Maureen Ryan will administer the grant.
With this initiative, we'll examine how anti-majoritarian institutions work in tandem with anti-democratic practices in American politics, both past and present. Many anti-majoritarian institutions trace their origins to the founding era in U.S. history. Anti-majoritarianism is also manifest through political projects that make democracy more difficult for others—including voting abuses during Jim Crow. Thus, the American project of achieving a just and equitable society—"a more perfect Union," as the Constitution aspires—must content with these anti-majoritarian impulses and institutions.
Professors Woody Holton (History) and Thomas Crocker (Law) will coordinate several research efforts that will allow scholars, students, and the public to investigate the struggle for ballot access from the founding era through our present moment.
Impact on the University Community
Joel Samuels, Dean of the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences, says, “The grant itself is incredibly important as we think about our current state and national landscape. When we think about restoring trust in higher education through impact of our work, this project is directly in line with that guiding principle. This shows how our work can connect big ideas and complex concepts to practical impacts affecting citizens daily.”
This is the first Mellon grant the University of South Carolina has received, and it is also the first grant for the newly launched Humanities Collaborative. Of this achievement, Samuels says, “I cannot emphasize enough what a watershed moment this is, not only for our College but for the University. I am excited to see the impact of this grant across our state and beyond.”
Civic Engagement, Voting Rights, and Founding Documents Programming
Beginning in fall 2023 and extending through Spring 2026, grant-related programming will confront this tradition of anti-majoritarianism via a series of events:
- A scholarly conference
- A monthly fellows’ seminar
- A public speakers’ series featuring nationally known authors and scholars
- Faculty and student workshops
All will tie to the University’s Founding Documents required curriculum and offer students, faculty, and the public a richer understanding of voter access and participation issues.
Fall 2025 Events
Jedediah Purdy Lecture, "Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law" |
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Derrick Spires Lecture,"Simple Justice: Reading the Nation through the Early Black Press" |
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Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library Derrick Spires is Associate Professor of Literatures in English and affiliate faculty in American Studies, Visual Studies, and Media Studies at Cornell University. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. He is author of The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Spires’ lecture draws on The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) to discuss how early African American intellectuals and organizers used newspapers and the Colored Conventions Movement to develop sophisticated analyses of democracy and citizenship in the United States. These writers returned to founding documents—the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention—to create a vision of political community with “simple justice” as its founding ideal. |
Robert Gross Lecture, "The Minutemen and their World" |
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Date and Time: April 8 at 5:30 pm Location: Petigru 108 Robert Gross, Draper Professor of American History, University of Connecticut (Emeritus), specializes in the social and cultural history of the U.S., from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. He is the author of the bestselling, The Minutemen and their World (Hill & Wang, 1976), the leading book on the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the first battle of the American War of Independence. He will discuss that battle and its origins in the everyday lives of Concord citizens on April 8, 2025 – 11 days before the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. |
Date and Time: March 27 at 3-4:30 pm
Co-sponsored Events
Student Debate, "Trump Should End Universal Birthright Citizenship, Yes or No?"(Co-sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough Center on Professionalism) |
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Date and Time: March 24 at 7pm Location: Karen J. Williams Courtroom, Rice School of Law This student-organized debate is run by The Lincoln-Douglas Society. It will feature students from U of SC Law on each side (along with guests from Heritage and the ACLU). Arguing "yes" will be Amy Swearer (Heritage) and Greenlee Rigby (2L). Arguing "no" will be Allen Chaney (ACLU) and Cameron Newton (2L). |
Direct Democracy and the Use of Referendums: What the UK can show the US |
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A Forgotten Founding Document from 1722: The Great Treaty of Albany and Indigenous Theories of Justice |
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Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library Nicole Eustace is Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of History at New York University. Eustace's research involves Eighteenth-century North America in the Atlantic world, and topics related to gender, culture, politics, and the history of emotion. Her talk is an exercise in creative nonfiction on the topic of settler colonialism. |
Date and Time: November 20 at 5:00 - 6:30 pm
Frances Lee |
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Aziz Rana |
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Date and Time: March 14 at 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Rice School of Law (Karen J. Williams Courtroom) Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College Law School and author of the forthcoming The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Rana is a prolific author and scholar specializing in American constitutional law and political development, especially in terms of how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding. Rana will discuss his forthcoming book The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), an eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world. Rana explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life. The veneration of the Constitution reflects greater political challenges in the US from justifying interventionist national state policies on a global scale to the struggles of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—to imagine different constitutional horizons. |
Bruce Ackerman
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Date and Time: March 21 at 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Rice School of Law (Karen J. Williams Courtroom) Bruce Ackerman is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, and the author of nineteen books in political philosophy, constitutional law, and public policy. Ackerman is author of the forthcoming Postmodern Predicaments (Yale Press, 2024). Ackerman will discuss the forthcoming The Postmodern Predicament: Existential Challenges of the Twenty-First Century (Yale Press, 2024). Human beings have taken one thing for granted since our earliest days: we are bodily creatures dealing with one another on a face-to-face basis. The internet has shattered this fundamental feature of human existence. We are suddenly living our lives in two worlds at once—shifting endlessly from virtual to physical reality as we reach out to others. Existentialist thinkers of the twentieth century like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre considered the fragmentation of modern life as a central source of contemporary anxieties. Like them, Ackerman views the challenges of the internet age as a political, no less than personal, problem—and proposes concrete reforms that that could mobilize broad-based support for democracy against demagogic assaults on its very foundations. |
AGB Book Talk and Signing with Gregg Hecimovich |
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Date and Time: January 25 at 6:30-7:30 pm Location: All Good Books |
AGB Book Talk and Signing with Frances Lee |
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Date and Time: February 2 at 12:00 pm Location: All Good Books |
AGB Book Talk and Signing with Aziz Rana |
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Date and Time: March 15 at 12:00 pm Location: All Good Books |
AGB Book Talk and Signing with Bruce Ackerman
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Date and Time: March 22 at 12:00 pm Location: All Good Books |
"Can our Democracy Survive this Supreme Court?"(Co-sponsored by the History Center, South Caroliniana Library, and Joseph F. Rice School of Law) |
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Date and Time: March 13, 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library Barbara Phillips, formerly an attorney with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, in conversation with civil rights attorney Armand Derfner, who has helped shape the Voting Rights Act in numerous Supreme Court arguments. He is coauthor of Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court. |
Peter Wood
(Co-sponsored by the History Center, Institute for Southern Studies, and South Caroliniana Library) |
Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740Date and Time: April 9 at 5:00-7:00 pm Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library Peter Wood will visit USC for a series of events marking the publication of the fiftieth anniversary edition of Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740, his groundbreaking history of Blacks in colonial South Carolina. Event includes book talk, signing, and reception. AGB Book Talk and Signing with Peter WoodDate and Time: April 10 at 10:00-11:30 am Location: All Good Books Peter Wood will lead a book group discussion. Twenty copies of Black Majority are available on a first come basis for those who would like to read the book in advance of Peter’s visit and participate in the discussion. If you are interested in joining the group, please contact Maclane Hull to reserve a book. |
Created Equal: How the Declaration of Independence Became a Founding Document |
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Date and Time: November 16, 4:00-5:30 pm Presenter: Eric Slauter Location: School of Law 103 (Karen J. Williams Courtroom)
The self-evident truths that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” may have constituted minor premises in the Declaration of Independence to all but a small number of contemporaries in 1776. But arguably no words from the period of the American Revolution have been more consequential to later generations. How, when, and why did these claims become central to an understanding of the Declaration? While most observers in 1776 paid more attention to the charges against King George and the powers claimed on behalf of free and independent states, one set of people saw the claims of equality and rights as its most important statement: opponents of slavery. Years later, it would be their reading that helped transform an instrument of international law into a founding document of domestic politics. In watching how those early Americans read the Declaration, and what they paid attention to, we get a powerful lesson in how a seemingly clear founding document can shift meaning over the years and even hold multiple meanings in its own time. We also see how a state paper designed to dissolve the political bands between Britain and the Colonies slowly and surprisingly came to be recognized as a founding document of American equality. Eric Slauter is the Deputy Dean of the Humanities and the College at the University of Chicago, where he is an associate professor in the Department of English, an associate faculty member in the Divinity School, and serves as the founding director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. Slauter brings his specialization in early American cultural, intellectual, legal, and political history to the discussion of the Declaration of Independence. |
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All Good Books Lunch with Frances Lee(Mellon Seminar) |
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Date and Time: November 10, 10:30 am-12:00 pm Presenter: Frances Lee Location: All Good Books Lunch with Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Lee will lead a discussion of two interrelated projects. First, drawing on a recent paper (coauthored with Jim Curry) on the Senate filibuster, Lee argues although many others focus on how the filibuster poses a nearly insuperable obstacle to a Senate majority party’s agenda, limiting Congress’s output to non-controversial measures, an even more common cause of failure is the majority party’s inability to agree among themselves. Despite increased voting cohesion generally, parties in the polarized era still routinely struggle to bridge their own internal divides. And second, she will analyze in a work in progress how polarization effects a President's relationship with Congress. She will discuss how two trends consistently weaken presidents in the polarized era: stronger partisanship in the mass public and geographic polarization. The public’s strong partisanship puts a firm, low ceiling on presidents’ job approval. Geographic polarization tends to confine presidents’ base of support to either red or blue states. Their narrow political base affords recent presidents little leverage in dealing with the opposition party in Congress, which has less incentive to work with presidents today than in the 20th century, when presidents were better able to both win support across the whole country and find votes from across the aisle in Congress. Please RSVP to Maclane Hull (WHULL@email.sc.edu) and Holly Crocker (hcrocker@mailbox.sc.edu) by November 3rd. |
All Good Books Lunch with Eric Slauter(Mellon Seminar) |
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Date and Time: November 17, 12:00-1:30 pm Presenter: Eric Slauter Location: All Good Books Eric Slauter will lead a follow-up discussion of “pocket constitutionalism.” Pocket constitutionalism is not a recent phenomenon. The earliest small-scale printed constitutions in the United States originated in the era of the American Revolution. In 1791, Thomas Paine told readers of The Rights of Man across the Atlantic that the Constitution of Pennsylvania had become “the political bible” of that state, that scarcely a family was without a copy, and that it was common for legislators “to take the printed constitution out of their pocket” during debates. Advertising a duodecimo printing of the Massachusetts Constitution in the Summer of 1787, in the aftermath of Shay’s Rebellion, printer Isaiah Thomas made the case that for the public good (and for a modest price) a copy of the state’s “Political Bible” should be in all hands. Sitting at the intersection of legal and political history and the history of the book, this essay explores this early history and surveys the longer life of small-scale printed constitutions. Closer attention to these revolutionary-era printed artifacts helps reveal dramatic shifts in late eighteenth-century understandings of what a constitution is and does; of how constitutions were read, disseminated, and deployed; of the relation between format and content in the writing of constitutions; of the origins of civic education; and of the nature of rights and what it meant—in a literal sense—to be a rights-bearing person. The first 10 people to RSVP for this meeting to Maclane Hull (WHULL@email.sc.edu) and Holly Crocker (hcrocker@mailbox.sc.edu) will win a copy of Slauter’s book, The State as a Work of Art. Please RSVP by November 10th. |