Greg Kaster (History)

Greg Kaster has been awarded a place in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Slavery and the Constitution in Washington, DC, July 8-21, 2018, co-directed by Paul Finkelman and Paul Benson. The institute will be based at the Library of Congress and will include as faculty such distinguished historians as Finkelman (a leading scholar of US slavery and the law), Eric Foner (Pulitzer-Prize winning historian of Reconstruction, abolitionism, and Lincoln), and Kate Masur (a leading historian of the Civil War and emancipation). Among the questions considered by the institute is the extent to which the Constitution was proslavery or antislavery, a question that animated antebellum politics and jurisprudence and has recently been revived by a prominent historian. The topic is directly relevant to and will inform several of Greg’s courses, including the US through the Civil War, American Lives (Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe), Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic, and Civil War America.