History Colloquium at Missouri – Christopher Childers on Webster-Hayne Debate

Professor Christopher Childers to speak on “Liberty and Union? Reassessing the Webster-Hayne Debate in Context” as part of the History Colloquium at the University of Missouri Kinder Forum on Constitutional Democracy – Friday, October 16th, 4:00 p.m. in Read Hall 304

The Kinder Forum will re-launch its Friday History Colloquium Series on October 16, 2015, with Benedictine College Assistant Professor of History Christopher Childers coming to campus to deliver a paper entitled “Liberty or Union? Reassessing the Webster-Hayne Debate in Context.” Working within and beyond past and current scholarship on the subject, Prof. Childers’ talk will use the 1830 debate as a lens through which to view competing ideas about the meaning of union to Americans in the early republic, focusing specifically on the role of the West and westerners in the emerging sectional issues of the time and, in turn, on how Webster and Hayne–and their followers–saw the West as the fulcrum of their respective political programs. The event will be held in Read Hall 304 at 4:00 PM, and will be followed by a reception in downtown Columbia. All Colloquium Series talks are free and open to the public, and the Forum encourages scholars from across all disciplines to attend.

Christopher Childers earned his Ph.D. in American History from Louisiana State University, where he received the Michael G. Miller Distinguished Dissertation Prize from the Department of History. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of History at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Prof. Childers is the author of The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics (University Press of Kansas, 2012), and has published articles and book chapters in Civil War History, Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, and The Enigmatic South: Toward the Civil War and Its Legacies.