Contact:Rajah Maples Wallace (573) 882-3346[email protected]
MU HISTORIAN APPLIES EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY TO PRESENT-DAY POLITICAL AFFAIRS
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- The 2000 presidential election was one few Americans will ever forget. During the fiasco, many journalists and scholars turned to early American history to learn more about closely contested presidential elections of the past and to compare them to the current one. Jeff Pasley, professor of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia, hopes Americans will turn to history more often to gain a better understanding of present-day politics. Now, in a new column for the online American history magazine "Common-Place," Pasley offers a resource to help people do just that.
In the column, "Publick Occurrences," available at http://www.common-place.org/publick, the former journalist and speech writer provides historical expertise online. Named after the first American newspaper, "Publick Occurrences" is devoted to commentary applying early American history to present-day political affairs. While its emphasis will be on placing current issues in broad historical perspective, the column also will police some of the early American historical references that appear frequently in today's political speeches and press.
"There are hundreds of political commentators out there and a few popular historians who appear on television talk shows, but there is no regular column bringing serious academic history to bear on current political issues," Pasley said. "I hope to give citizens easy access to a historical perspective on politics that goes back further than FDR and JFK and deeper than the fun presidential facts we heard on television last fall."
In his first column, "Losing One to the Gipper," Pasley writes about conservative efforts to replace Alexander Hamilton with Ronald Reagan on the $10 bill. New columns will be posted at least four times a year, with more frequent updates on Pasley's own Web site at http://jeff.pasleybrothers.com/punditry.htm. Readers may respond and contribute their own perspectives by logging onto the site's Republic of Letters section at http://www.common-place.org/republic.
Pasley, who received his doctorate in history from Harvard University, is a former journalist for The New Republic and speech writer for Al Gore's first presidential campaign in 1988. Pasley is the author of "The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic," which was released this month.
-30-
RSS