UConn expert weighs in on controversial statue debate at the Connecticut Capitol
What should be the fate of the large statue commemorating John Mason that adorns the Connecticut State Capitol Building? He’s a historic figure and founder of the Connecticut Colony. He also left a legacy of violence and murder, with more than 400 Indigenous people, including 175 women and children, killed under his command.
And whether to let his statue stand or remove it has engaged a debate from leading experts, historians, relatives of Mason, and the Indigenous community across the state.
UConn’s Manisha Sinha was asked to lend her expertise to the situation:
Manisha Sinha, a University of Connecticut professor of 19th century U.S. history, said she is a veteran of debates about the fate of statues memorializing Confederate leaders as well as founding fathers who owned slaves. “I have advocated for the taking down of statues that commemorate Confederate leaders and generals, who I see as traitors to the American republic, fighting for the worst cause in American history, as General Grant put it, in the cause of human bondage,” Sinha said. “On the other hand, I have opposed the taking down of statues of some of our founding fathers, revolutionary figures who did not defend slavery as a positive good.” Sinha said history can be complex, and great men of history can be flawed. “The Mason massacre is not a complex story,” she said. “It was a sheer massacre of non-combatants and of women, children and elders. We cannot excuse this by pointing to internecine warfare among Native Americans.” Mason’s statue is not necessary to teach history, she said. “I think it is high time that you think of removing John Mason’s statue,” Sinha said. “It cannot be contextualized. We do not remember history by statues, especially not in the monumental 19th century forms. We actually end up commemorating people, making them heroic.” November 18 – The CT Mirror This is a sensitive and very important topic as America reconciles with its past and moves forward as a country. And, if you are a journalist covering this topic, then let our experts help with your in-depth coverage and questions.
Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the author of "The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition." She is an expert in the era of America during the 19th Century and available to speak with media regarding this topic – simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.
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Is this the biggest election since 1860? Let our expert explain why
The upcoming U.S. presidential election is happening in unprecedented times and during what could be the most divisive era in more than a century and a half.
This week, one of the University of Connecticut’s historical experts, Manisha Sinha, was featured by CNN to explain her point that America is indeed facing its biggest election in 160 years.
“The 2020 presidential election is certainly as consequential as that of 1860. It is, as Biden is fond of saying, a battle for the 'soul of America.' The fate of the American republic once again hangs in the balance. Like the slaveholders of the 1850s, Trump, his followers and enablers are in a position to pose an existential threat to American democracy. Like many slaveholders, Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. "If history appears first as tragedy, then as farce, the counterparts of southern secessionists and proslavery theorists today are QAnon conspiracy theorists, neo Confederates, and the right-wing Boogaloo boys. Much of the contemporary Republican Party that refuses to repudiate Trump is like those southern Whites who may not have had a direct stake in slavery but went with their states, who ultimately chose slavery before the republic. The choice -as the Republicans of the Lincoln Project, who have broken with their party, put it -is between America and Trump.” Dr. Sinha’s full op-ed is available on CNN.com and is a must-read for anyone looking to put this year’s election into historical context.
And, if you are a journalist looking to cover this topic, let our experts help with your coverage.
Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the author of "The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition." She is available to speak with media regarding this topic – simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.
Biography
Manisha Sinha is professor and the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty and received the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award in Recognition of Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Advising from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for over twenty years. Her recent book The Slave’s Cause was reviewed by The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic, and The Boston Globe, among other newspapers and journals. It was featured as the Editor’s Choice of the New York Times Book Review. It was named the book of the week by Times Higher Education in May, 2016 to coincide with its UK publication and one of three Great History Books for 2016 in Bloomberg News. Her first book, The Counterrevolution of Slavery, was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015. In 2017, she was named one of Top Twenty Five Women in Higher Education by the magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.
Sinha’s research interests lie in United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is a member of the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library, co-editor of the “Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900,” series of the University of Georgia Press, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Civil War Era. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post and been interviewed by The Times of London, The Boston Globe, and Slate. She appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in 2014. She was an adviser and on-screen expert for the Emmy nominated PBS documentary, The Abolitionists (2013), which is a part of the NEH funded Created Equal film series. Professor Sinha is on leave for the 2016-2017 academic year working on her new book on abolition and the making of Radical Reconstruction.
Areas of Expertise
Feminism
Abolition
Slavery
Education
Columbia University
Ph.D.
Affiliations
Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, President (2024)
Accomplishments
2022 Guggenheim Fellow
2022-05-10
The 2022 fellowship class comprises artists and scholars from throughout the United States and Canada and includes those whose expertise varies from the natural sciences to social sciences, humanities to creative arts. Sinha is one of five to receive awards for research in U.S. history and was among nearly 2,500 fellowship applicants.
2021 Universität Heidelberg James W.C. Pennington Award
2022-06-01
The Pennington Award is bestowed by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and the Faculty of Theology. It commemorates the American pastor and former slave James W.C. Pennington, who. received an honorary doctorate from the Ruperto Carola in 1849, making him the first African American to receive this academic honor from a European university.
From the Confederacy to the Gilded Age: Manisha Sinha on the "sorry history" that inspires MAGA
Salon online
2025-04-04
Whether the country is good or evil is the wrong debate: like most people, and every other nation on earth, it’s a bit of both. Progress has always come in uneven fits, with hypocrisies galore — killing Nazis while putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps — and a loud chorus of reactionaries claiming that every step toward fulfilling the promise of equal rights is itself part of the march to tyranny, classically liberal rhetoric perverted to defend white dominion over others as the true definition of freedom.
“It can be a depressing story if you look at the downfall and the kind of backlash and reaction to progressive change,” Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, said in an interview, “but it can also be inspiring to think about all the people who fought against injustices and inequality — and ultimately prevailed.”
Times have changed. Civiqs data for January 17, 2025 showed 41% of registered voters now support Black Lives Matter and 43% oppose it.
“The Black Lives Matter movement reached an apex with the George Floyd murder, and since then it’s been under attack,” said University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, a history of Reconstruction and the backlash to it. “Not just the Black Lives Movement, but any sort of attempt to talk about Black history. We’ve just seen this enormous right-wing movement; they seem to be the ones more energized now.”
Experts say Project 2025 is a ‘radical transformation of American political life'
NBC Connecticut tv
2024-09-13
It’s normal for think tanks across the political spectrum to create plans and model policies, but political science professors say Project 2025 goes further.
“It would basically kneecap the U.S. government,” University of Connecticut Professor Manisha Sinha said.
Failures of the Reconstruction: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic
Prevail with Greg Olear online
2024-08-16
Greg talks with the historian Manisha Sinha and discusses her book “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.” The book explores the period between the Civil War and World War I, highlighting the importance of Reconstruction in shaping the country. Sinha explains her motivation for writing the book and the significance of the Second American Republic. She also draws parallels between Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump, emphasizing the consequences of showing mercy to Confederates. Sinha delves into the horrors of the first Ku Klux Klan and the violent opposition to Reconstruction. The conversation explores the end of Reconstruction, the Compromise of 1877, the nadir of American democracy, the conquest of the West, and the legacy of Reconstruction. It also delves into the question of how a society can atone for its national sins. Plus: coup right, with Coup-Vite!
How The Republican Party Went From Anti-Slavery to Pro-Imperialism
KPFA Radio radio
2024-06-11
Guest: Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and her latest, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.
“Unprecedented in the History of American Republicanism”: Historian on Trump Verdict & GOP Extremism
Democracy Now online
2024-05-31
In a historic verdict, a New York jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts in his criminal hush money and election interference trial. Trump is now the first former president to be convicted of a felony and faces up to four years in prison. “All this is unprecedented in the history of American republicanism,” says U.S. historian Manisha Sinha. “A man like Trump could very much upend this over-200-year historical experiment in representative government.”
A Furious, Forgotten Slave Narrative Resurfaces After Nearly 170 Years
The New York Times print
2024-05-23
Manisha Sinha, a leading historian of abolition at the University of Connecticut, called it “a major discovery” and “a wow,” which adds to our understanding of the evolution of Black antislavery activism.
Historians have known John Jacobs as a barely documented player in radical abolitionist circles of the 1840s, who sometimes lectured alongside Frederick Douglass, his neighbor in Rochester, N.Y.
In 1851, Douglass broke with the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, rejecting his view of the Constitution as an irredeemable “covenant with death.” But unlike Douglass, Sinha said, “Jacobs doesn’t give up on his radical indictment of the United States.”
Supreme Court to decide if insurrection clause can block Trump from Colorado ballot
PBS News Hour tv
2024-02-07
Manisha Sinha is a Civil War historian at the University of Connecticut and one of the many researchers who submitted amicus briefs in this case.
"The reason why the framers decided to do this was because they wanted to discourage political domestic violence, which is exactly what is happening in the postwar South at this time."
Can Trump run? Historic case will test Supreme Court.
Christian Science Monitor online
2024-02-07
The scarcity of Section 3 cases over the centuries “tells you there haven’t been many instances of an insurrection against the United States,” says Manisha Sinha, a professor of American history at the University of Connecticut who joined a historians’ amicus brief arguing that Mr. Trump is disqualified.
Nevertheless, the 14th Amendment “is the foundation of modern democracy in the United States,” she adds. While Section 3 may be infrequently used, “it’s not something we can pick and choose to obey or to implement.”
The Supreme Court Can’t Let Fear of Trump Supporters Force Its Hand
Slate online
2024-02-05
When a violent mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, most of us looked on with frozen horror. But the minds of Civil War historians turned to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, designed to bar former Confederates from holding public office during Reconstruction. And while the history is not well known to the majority of us, Section 3 is what the Colorado case hangs on, and it is very well known to the many historians who signed amicus briefs laying all this out.
Professor Manisha Sinha is one of 25 historians who signed on to one such brief. Her work is also cited in a second amicus brief from another group of eminent historians, including Jill Lepore. I spoke with Sinha on a recent episode of Amicus.
These local schools are named for people with racist histories. Is it time for a change?
Daily Comet online
2023-07-17
Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, has written and lectured extensively on 21st Century American adjustments to the sins of the nation’s past, including removal of statutes and changing of street, building and school names that honor Confederate officers and others involved with the rebellion. She is particularly concerned about schools.
“Children are attending these schools, and Confederate leaders and generals had absolutely no redeeming quality to them,” Sinha said in an interview. “They promoted white supremacy in the South. They committed treason against the Republic. We should not be commemorating Confederate leaders, and we should not be commemorating segregationists.”
Trump indictment no 'witch hunt,' UConn professor says
The Day of New London print
2023-03-31
Manisha Sinha, who spoke from Los Angeles, where she was attending an Organization of American Historians' conference, dismissed Trump supporters' claims that his indictment Thursday was the result of a politically motivated "witch hunt."
"That couldn't be further from the truth," Sinha said. "He was not indicted by the Democratic Party, not even by (Manhattan District Attorney) Alvin Bragg but by fellow citizens serving on a grand jury. ... As everyone is saying, it's an unprecedented situation to have a former president indicted. But Trump's presidency itself was pretty unprecedented ― riddled with scandal and wrongdoing."
As politics grew increasingly violent in the 1850s, Americans understood that unresolvable conflicts over the extension of slavery and the disproportionate political power of the slaveholders could lead to disunion and war. In the view of some historians, activism outside Congress, driven by radical abolitionists as well as pro-slavery ruffians, forced the major parties to seek compromises to hold the country together, only to fall short because of the immensity of the problem and intransigence of the Slave Power. This political turmoil produced prolonged and acrimonious contests for House speaker, a history that suddenly became relevant again when the House needed 15 ballots over five days to elect California Rep. Kevin McCarthy. In this episode, University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha, a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition, talks about the parallels between past and present as Americans witness today's political polarization worsening.
Jan. 6 committee just made history. How will history judge it?
Christian Science Monitor online
2022-12-19
In the modern era, Watergate was “pretty bad – or at least that’s what we thought then,” says Manisha Sinha, professor of American history at the University of Connecticut.
But the number and seriousness of the offenses surrounding the aftermath of the 2020 election surpass even those of Watergate, says Professor Sinha.
They involved blocking the peaceful transfer of power, and included the storming of the Capitol.
“Even though we’ve had instances of political violence in this country, especially in the South after the Civil War ... [Jan. 6] was still, for many Americans, something they hadn’t seen in their lifetimes,” says Professor Sinha.
Historians advise the president. The problem? The scholars were all white.
NPR radio
2022-09-04
Reconstruction was a bold plan to repair the wounds of slavery, and build out of the ashes of civil war a multiracial democracy. Rather than accept equality, it was violently overturned by Southern whites.
"At the turn of the century we lost everything," says University of Connecticut Professor Manisha Sinha.
"It all went down the drain because of a very reactionary Supreme Court and because of state laws and local authorities who were willing to subvert elections and not allow people to vote."
The Buffalo shooting was centuries in the making, experts say
NBC News online
2022-05-18
Gendron’s allegedly wrote that he was radicalized on 4chan due to boredom during the early months of the pandemic in 2020. But this theory is not native to 4Chan — Manisha Sinha, an American and African American history professor at the University of Connecticut, said its origins stretch back even further, to slavery and the Reconstruction era. Although fear of Black autonomy and power in the country has long existed, “great replacement” began to take shape as a definitive theory in the late 19th century.
“This is an idea that was organized at the height of Jim Crow and scientific racism,” Sinha said. “You have a situation where people in the post-war South just cannot accept the idea of people of African descent as equal citizens and fellow citizens in the republic. This kind of racist opposition to Black rights and Black citizenship is one of the long, lingering legacies and afterlife of slavery in this country. So you have this huge campaign of racist terror.”
One Year After the Capitol Attack, and Why It Could Happen Again
Diverse Issues in Higher Education online
2022-01-06
Dr. Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and an expert on the Civil War and slavery, taught a seminar on Reconstruction last January.
“Most of my students could draw the parallels between what happened then and now,” said Sinha. “The main takeaway that I tried to convey was how contested and fragile American democracy has been, something that had not occurred to many Americans, including my students.”
Connecticut’s ‘time of reckoning’ with a colonial hero’s horrific past
Connecticut Mirror online
2021-11-18
Manisha Sinha, a University of Connecticut professor of 19th century U.S. history, said she is a veteran of debates about the fate of statues memorializing Confederate leaders as well as founding fathers who owned slaves.
“I have advocated for the taking down of statues that commemorate Confederate leaders and generals, who I see as traitors to the American republic, fighting for the worst cause in American history, as General Grant put it, in the cause of human bondage,” Sinha said. “On the other hand, I have opposed the taking down of statues of some of our founding fathers, revolutionary figures who did not defend slavery as a positive good.”
Sinha said history can be complex, and great men of history can be flawed.
Activist David Ruggles fought kidnappers, helped free 600 slaves
Texas News Today online
2021-09-04
Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, said the emerging Black abolitionists in this period were engaged in a “two-pronged fight.”
“I think it’s really important for us to understand that for free Black people, this fight was personal,” Sinha said. “They were fighting against slavery in the South, but they were also fighting against racism at home. They faced segregation in every walk of life.”
How Tulsa massacre spent most of last century unremembered
Associated Press online
2021-05-29
“If we don’t understand the nature of the harm ... we can’t really have a full reckoning with the possibility of any kind of redress,” he said.
Manisha Sinha, a professor of American history at the University of Connecticut, agreed.
“It’s really important for Americans to learn from the past, because you really cannot even understand some of our current-day political divisions and ideas unless you realize that this conversation over both the nature and the parameters of American democracy is an ongoing and a really long one,” she said.
Historians Correct Nikki Haley After George Washington Tweet
Newsweek print
2021-02-16
History professors highlighted the inaccuracies in Haley's post and joked about the number of errors she'd made.
"Historian here, the Constitution created the presidency and not vice versa. But maybe the Continental Army flown into airports managed to reverse time?" wrote Manish Sinha of the University of Connecticut.
Sinha was referring to remarks by former President Donald Trump about troops during the Revolutionary War taking over airports. There were no airplanes or airports in the late 18th century.
Politicians Quote Abraham Lincoln a Lot. Historians Say They Don't Always Do His Words Justice
Time Magazine print
2021-02-11
This side of Lincoln also tends to get lost when calls for unity quote his second inaugural address from 1865, saying “with malice toward none, with charity for all” and “let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds.” During the debates on whether or not to impeach Trump a second time, the Republican House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise quoted those lines to argue against a rushed impeachment and for moving forward.
“What bothers me the most is the way in which people today remember Lincoln as mainly a forgiving peacemaker and quote him selectively instead of as the President who made ‘total war’ upon slavery and understood the Civil War as divine judgement for the national sin of slavery,” says Manisha Sinha, a historian at the University of Connecticut.
The Capitol Insurrection Revived The Story Of A Legendary Abolitionist
KCUR 98.3 - Kansas City radio
2021-01-19
The namesake of Sumner Academy in Kansas City, Kansas, was almost killed on the U.S. Senate floor for his "Crime Against Kansas" speech in 1856. Now, a photo from the insurrection this month has people remembering U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner's story. UConn's Manisha Sinha comments to KCUR in Kansas City.
2020 was a remarkably difficult year — not only because of the pandemic
Washington Post print
2020-12-31
The year was, as the saying goes, one for the history books. So how will future generations look back at 2020?
Many historians will see it as “a really consequential year,” Manisha Sinha, a scholar of slavery, abolition and the U.S. civil war at the University of Connecticut, predicted.
News of the pandemic, economic collapse and other major events, such as the divisive U.S. election and its aftermath, seemed at times to shroud other important developments around the world. “That just goes to show,” Sinha said, the degree to which “things have been upended so much both domestically and internationally.”
Manisha Sinha, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the author of “The Counterrevolution of Slavery,” pointed out in an email that there was one time when there was a substantial rejection of the outcome of a presidential contest:
"Indeed it happened in 1860 when most Deep South states refused to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency on an antislavery platform and seceded from the Union."
After bitterly divided election, what's next for America
CNN online
2020-11-09
After nearly five breathless days of vote-counting, the American people -- and the world -- got the news Saturday: Joe Biden would be the next president of the United States. So, where to now, nation? CNN Opinion asked 26 commentators to consider the question: What does the outcome of this election say about America in 2020? The opinions are their own.
‘Game-Changer’: Kamala Harris Makes History As Next Vice President
WBEZ Chicago radio
2020-11-08
Harris, 56, will bring a legion of firsts to the vice presidency: A daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, she will be the first woman, the first Black person, the first Indian American and the first Asian American to hold the office. She will also be the first graduate of a historically Black college and first member of a Black sorority to do so.
“It sends a message about what kind of country we are today,” said Manisha Sinha, a professor of American history at the University of Connecticut. “An interracial democracy that represents people, men and women, from all over the globe. I think that’s a very good thing for American democracy. And for me personally, it gives me a sense of national belonging that may not have been there before to some extent.”
Fact check: Historical claims about constitutional amendments lack context
USA Today print
2020-09-25
The remaining Democrats in Congress were divided along pro- and anti-war lines, though remained obstinate in their opposition to Republican government.
“They acted like a thorn in the side of the Lincoln administration,” said Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and author of “The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition.”
Manisha Sinha, professor of American history at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2017), talks about why Joe Biden's selection of Senator Kamala Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, to be his choice for VP is so meaningful to her and other Indian-Americans.
National controversy over Native American mascots reaches Central Mass.
Worcester Telegram print
2020-07-25
But this year, Native American advocates and their allies and academics said new awareness of systemic racism and racial identity sparked by the killing of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has added fire to the mascot debate.
“It began with taking down symbols and statues and monuments of people who stood against human rights ... and I think that has led to a wider conversation about symbols and statues and monuments that may be bad,” said professor Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. “I think it’s good we’re having a national conversation about not demeaning people in stereotype.”
As statues of Founding Fathers topple, debate rages over where protesters should draw the line
Washington Post print
2020-07-07
Manisha Sinha, a Civil War historian at the University of Connecticut and the author of “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” said that the removal of the statues should be done after “thoughtful discussion,” rather than by “indiscriminate” action. Sinha said that by targeting Founding Fathers such as Washington and Jefferson, activists risk playing into the conservative narrative that removal of statues is a “slippery slope” toward an erasure of the country’s history.
After the Columbus statues come down, will other monuments come under scrutiny?
Hartford Courant print
2020-07-06
University of Connecticut History Professor Manisha Sinha said the case for the removal of Yale and Mason are different because the former is on private property and the latter is on public property.
“When our tax dollars are spent to maintain questionable statues then the community or government should weigh in,” Sinha said.
UW-Madison students call for removal of Abraham Lincoln statue on Bascom Hill
Wisconsin State Journal print
2020-06-27
University of Connecticut professor and Civil War historian Manisha Sinha said she would be “horrified” if UW-Madison took Lincoln’s statue down because of his long list of redeeming qualities. She characterized the recent push to expand statue removal beyond Confederate generals and other obvious symbols of slavery to include widely celebrated individuals with complicated pasts, such as slave-owning presidents, as “misplaced.”
Should Statues Of Historic Figures With Complicated Pasts Be Taken Down?
NPR Morning Edition radio
2020-06-23
David Greene talks to Manisha Sinha, professor of American history at the University of Connecticut, about the recent toppling of non-Confederate statues like those of George Washington.
Professor Manisha Sinha is an expert on U.S. history and the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She discussed her thoughts on the debates to remove controversial statues which are sweeping across the country.
Historian: With Impeachment Acquittal, the GOP Has Given Trump a Blank Check to Do Anything He Wants
Democracy Now online
2020-02-06
We speak with Manisha Sinha, professor of American history at the University of Connecticut and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.
The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts
The Atlantic print
2019-12-23
On this question, the critics of the 1619 Project are on firm ground. Although some southern slave owners likely were fighting the British to preserve slavery, as Silverstein writes in his rebuttal, the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was strongest. Early patriots like James Otis, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were opposed to slavery, and the Revolution helped fuel abolitionism in the North.
Historians who are in neither Wilentz’s camp nor the 1619 Project’s say both have a point. “I do not agree that the American Revolution was just a slaveholders' rebellion,” Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, told me. “But also understand that the original Constitution did give some ironclad protections to slavery without mentioning it.”
The capitulation of Republicans restored civility between the major parties, but the political truce masked a horrendous spike in violence against freedmen. “While the parties clearly move back from confrontation with each other, you have the unleashing of massive white-supremacist violence in the South against African Americans and a systematic campaign to disenfranchise, a systematic campaign of racial terror in the South,” Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, told me. “This is an era when white supremacy becomes virtually a national ideology.”
The Enduring Battle to Diversify Historical Reenactment
The New Republic print
2019-11-13
With few exceptions, Hollywood tends to soften its messages on slavery, the Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights era for white audiences. The creators of the recent Harriet Tubman biopic, Harriet, have had to defend their decision to show a white man saving Harriet Tubman from a villainous black slave catcher. The moment, even as the white man remains an evil vengeful slaveowner, explores the innate complexity of humanity, the film’s defenders claim. Or was it for the comfort of white moviegoers and the ticket sales they bring? Such black slave catchers “were few and far between,” University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha told the History News Network in October—and far outnumbered by those “assisting fugitive slaves and in the abolitionist underground.”
Opinion: How the Supreme Court got things so wrong on Trump ruling
CNN
2024-03-04
As our country confronts another crisis of American republicanism unleashed by former President Donald Trump and his followers’ reluctance to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, we are rediscovering the importance of the Reconstruction-era 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Midterm elections are usually not history-making stuff. Few have been memorable. But in the 2022 midterms, as in the 1866 elections, the fate of American democracy hangs in the balance. If there is a moment from history that our current political moment most resembles, it is the 1866 midterm elections, held a year after the end of the Civil War.
The party in power has historically lost midterm elections with a few exceptions. Political pundits have repeated this conventional wisdom this year, with predictions of a November debacle for Democrats.
What this 18th century poet reveals about Amanda Gorman's success
CNN
2021-02-01
Amid the phenomenal response to Amanda Gorman, who delivered a poem to wide acclaim at President Joe Biden's inauguration, lurked a bleaker current: responses that summoned for me the story of enslaved early American poet Phillis Wheatley. In 1773, Wheatley became not just one of the first Black women but one of the first American women to be published when her book of poems, "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," was printed in London. Wheatley traveled to England with her master's son when her book was published, and according to biographer Vincent Carretta, probably returned to America only on the condition she be granted her freedom.
The 2020 presidential election is one of the most crucial in American history.
Political pundits have taken to discussing past presidential elections, especially those that have been politically controversial and close, searching for a historical precedent.
The so-called Revolution of 1800 put Jeffersonian Republicans in charge and drove the Federalist Party to extinction.
The average person may be forgiven for thinking that the South actually won the Civil War. Despite a brief experiment in interracial democracy during the Reconstruction years, for much of its history the region has upheld a regime of brutal racial subordination. In the late 19th century, after the overthrow of Reconstruction, many of its state governments disenfranchised Black men, instituted racial segregation, condoned racial terrorism and violence, and kept a majority of Black and white Southerners economically bound through sharecropping, debt peonage, convict lease labor, and tenancy. By the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt called the South the nation’s No. 1 economic problem, resistant to unionization and social policies. Even today it leads in indices for poverty and weak educational systems.
When I arrived in the United States in 1984, an Indian graduate student wanting to study African-American history, I was an anomaly. Most of my fellow South Asians were in STEM doctoral programs. During the Reagan years, I supported the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and the Democratic Socialists of America in their attempt to push the Democratic Party and the United States to the left. Still, I could have ill-imagined that one day an African-American man would become the president or that a woman of Jamaican and Indian descent would be a candidate for the vice presidency.
Are you ready for Trump's Gettysburg Address? "As a Civil War historian, I am appalled"
CNN
2020-08-11
President Donald Trump announced recently that he would like to deliver his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for the presidency either at the White House or the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania. It is no surprise that Trump is eager to overthrow all presidential norms and use his official residence, the White House, as a backdrop for his convention address.
Last week, in defense of her father, Ivanka Trump tweeted out a quotation she wrongly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville: “A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office.”
The misquotation came from an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal that has since been corrected. What is fascinating about this incident though, is that the quotation actually comes from an 1889 book, “American Constitutional Law,” that defends Andrew Johnson against his impeachment in 1868. By the time the book was written, emancipation and the attempt to guarantee black rights lay in shambles, and conservatives rallied to the defense of Johnson, one of the most reviled presidents in American history.
The election of the first African-American president prompted something of a renaissance for films about slavery and race as audiences became more receptive to this new history. During Obama’s presidency, films including Lincoln, Django Unchained, 12 Years a Slave, The Birth of a Nation, and 13th were released. These movies have helped popularize a more holistic history of slavery and its legacy, and in ...
Did He Die an Abolitionist? The Evolution of Abraham Lincoln's Antislavery
American Political Thought
2015
In 1865, William Lloyd Garrison wondered whether he had become a Lincoln emancipationist or Abraham Lincoln had become a Garrisonian abolitionist. This article traces the evolution of Lincoln’s views on slavery and race, from free soil to abolition and from colonization to black citizenship. It argues that at the end of his life, Lincoln inhabited abolitionist ground when he called for limited ...
The Complicated Histories of Emancipation: State of the Field at 150
Reviews in American History
2013
The sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued in the midst of the Civil War in 1863, has proven to be a veritable boon to emancipation studies. Several recently published books, including those considered in this essay, have added depth and dimension to the story of the coming of emancipation. The question remains whether they add anything to the history that has now become familiar ...
Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit...
To "Cast Just Obliquy" on Oppressors: Black Radicalism in the Age of Revolution
The William and Mary Quarterly
2007
Historians have yet to fully appreciate the alternative and radical nature of black abolitionist ideology and its origins in the revolutionary era and the early Republic. Most continue to portray black abolitionists, in Patrick Rael's words, not as "counterhegemons" but as "cofabricators" of northern political culture. They argue that African Americans appropriated mainstream values and ideas to construct ...
