Date and Time: October 26, 4:00-5:30 pm

Presenter: Colin Woodard

Location: School of Law 103 (Karen J. Williams Courtroom)

Colin Woodard, the director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University and the New York Times bestselling author of six books, will discuss the historical struggle to create a national myth for the US that emerges from conflicting regional identities, values, and ideals. On one hand, historians, political leaders, and novelists anchored in New England promoted the idea of America as nation that had a God-given mission to lead humanity toward freedom, equality, and self-government. This emerging narrative was swiftly contested by another set of intellectuals, led by South Carolina’s William Gilmore Simms, who argued that the United States was the homeland of the allegedly superior “Anglo-Saxon” race, upon whom divine and Darwinian favor shined. A man raised in Columbia – Woodrow Wilson – would bring the latter vision to fruition across the federation in the 1910s and 1920s, an accomplishment that helps explain the vulnerability of our liberal democracy today. 

Created Equal: How the Declaration of Independence Became a Founding Document

Date and Time: November 16, 4:00-5:30 pm

Presenter: Eric Slauter

Location: School of Law 103 (Karen J. Williams Courtroom)

Eric Slauter is the Deputy Dean of the Humanities and the College at the University of Chicago, brings his specialization in early American cultural, intellectual, legal, and political history to the discussion of the Declaration of Independence. 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 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? Most observers in 1776 paid more attention to the charges against King George and the powers claimed on behalf of free and independent states. However, opponents of slavery highlighted these claims of equality and rights as its most profound statement, transforming an instrument of international law intended to dissolve political bands between Britain and the Colonies into a founding document of domestic politics. This shift demonstrates the changing and multiple meanings of the Declaration as it gradually becomes a founding document of American equality.

All Good Books Lunch with Frances Lee

(Mellon Seminar)

Date and Time: Novemeber 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)

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.