The admission of Missouri to the Union quickly became a constitutional crisis of the first order, inciting an intensive reexamination of the U.S. Constitution by the U.S. Congress. The heart of the question in need of resolution was whether that body possessed the authority to place conditions on a territory—in this instance Missouri—regarding restrictions on slavery—before its admittance to the Union.

The larger question with which the legislators grappled were the limits of the Constitution’s provisions granting Congress the authority to affect the institution of slavery—both where it already existed and where it could expand. The issue—what would come to be known as the Missouri Crisis—severely tested the still young republic and, some four decades later, would all but rend it asunder. This timely collection of original essays thoughtfully engages the intersections of history and constitutional law, and is certain to find eager readers among historians, legal scholars, political scientists, as well as many who call Missouri home.

Contributing Authors:
William S. Belko
Christopher Childers
John Eastman
Brook Poston
John R. Van Atta

Social historians today are calling into question the persuasiveness of the master narratives that have dominated our stories about the past. Motivated now by personal and professional commitments to solving problems by telling stories, not by epistemological and ontological certitude, social historians are constructing alternative narratives relevant to an expanded, more inclusive audience. The essays in this thoughtful volume reflect an explicit self-consciousness about historians' choices of narrative strategies, a new skepticism of the rhetorical strategies embedded in all scholarly arguments, and a recognition that every historian has a point of view.

Critically examining past master narratives in light of emerging alternatives, these essayists ask us to reevaluate the stories we tell, the narrative traditions within which they are situated, and the audiences they are designed to persuade. The first essays explore the gendered character of social history rhetoric by exposing alternative, feminist traditions of social scientific and social historical writing. The second section focuses on alternative narrative traditions of historical writing in non-European contexts, specifically India, Japan, and China. And the third group spotlights the rhetorical uses of synthesis in the writings of social historians.

The essays feature the range of narrative possibilities available to historians who have become self-critical about the pervasive use of unexamined master narratives; they show how limited that tradition can be compared with the diverse alternatives derived from, for example, gendered traditions of Latin American travel writers of the nineteenth century, Victorian women's historical writing, or the lively subaltern tradition in Indian social history. Together they argue not for the abandonment of historical materialism or the elimination of all master narratives but for the reinvigoration of social history through the use of new and more persuasive arguments based on alternative narratives.

Fables of American history embodied in Gilded Age literature
 
In this study of Gilded Age literature and culture, Ben Railton proposes that in the years after Reconstruction, America’s identity was often contested through distinct and competing conceptions of the nation’s history. He argues that the United States moved toward unifying and univocal historical narratives in the years between the Centennial and Columbian Expositions, that ongoing social conflict provided sites for complications of those narratives, and that works of historical literature offer some of the most revealing glimpses into the nature of those competing visions.
 
Gilded Age scholarship often connects the period to the 20th-century American future, but Railton argues that it is just as crucial to see how the era relates to the American past. He closely analyzes the 1876 and 1893 Expositions, finding that many of the period’s central trends, from technology to imperialism, were intimately connected to particular visions of the nation’s history. Railton’s concern is with four key social questions: race, Native Americans, women, and the South. He provides close readings of a number of texts for the ways they highlight these issues. He examines established classics (The Adventures of Huck Finn and The Bostonians); newer additions to the canon (The Conjure Woman, Life Among the Piutes, The Story of Avis); largely forgotten best-sellers (Uncle Remus, The Grandissimes); unrecovered gems (Ploughed Under, Where the Battle Was Fought); and autobiographical works by Douglass and Truth, poems by Harper and Piatt, and short stories by Woolson and Cook.
 
These readings, while illuminating the authors themselves, contribute to ongoing conversations over historical literature’s definition and value, and a greater understanding of not only American society in the Gilded Age, but also debates on our shared but contested history that remain very much alive in the present.
 

A critical reassessment of nineteenth‑century American architecture that uncovers how race, settler colonialism, and contested national identities shaped the built environment and its historiography.

Rewriting American Architecture offers a revisionist riposte to the canonical story of nineteenth-century American architecture. Drawing on new archival research and revisionist historiography, the essays in this volume reveal how American architecture was shaped not by inevitable progress toward a unified national culture but by the turbulent realities of race, labor, settler colonialism, and territorial expansion. Rather than treating architecture as an apolitical aesthetic expression, the contributors expose it as an active arena in which the meanings of nationhood were constructed, contested, and often violently enforced. From Indigenous spatial practices and Black institutional building to transnational exchanges and the racial politics embedded in professionalization, this collection reframes the built environment as central to the competing cultural, political, and geographic claims that defined the United States during this period.