America in the World at 250: A View from a Bloody Borderland

As we conclude the nation’s semiquincentennial, at a moment when the American experiment once again teeters on the precipice of political violence, historian Jay Sexton reflects on the history of a region that has embodied the headlines of the United States at 250: our constitutional democracy failed before it triumphed, and it has been marked, at every stage, by political violence and war. Free and open to the public. Light snacks provided! RSVP to Attend Here Speaker: Jay Sexton Jay Sexton is the Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy, Professor of History, and Director of the Kinder Institute. A native of Salina, Kansas, Sexton returned to the Midwest to the University of Missouri in 2016 after spending the better part of two decades at Oxford University in England. He started in Oxford as a grad student Marshall Scholar and worked his way up to being Director of the Rothermere American Institute (RAI) and, upon his departure, being elected a Distinguished Fellow of the RAI and an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Sexton specializes in the political and economic history of the nineteenth century. His research situates the United States in its international context, particularly as it related to the dominant global structure of the era, the British Empire. His most recent book, A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018), argues that international forces have shaped the course of U.S. history during its greatest moments of transformative change. His other books include Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (Oxford, 2005; 2nd ed. 2014) and The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2011). He also has published four major collaborative projects: The Global Lincoln (co-edited with Richard Carwardine, Oxford, 2011); Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding to the Age of Terrorism (co-edited with Ian Tyrrell, Cor...