Thursday 29 November 2012 at 12:30
Oxford Legal History Forum
Paper Money, Debt Relief, and the Creditors' Constitution: Why Were the Anti-Federalists Silent?
Speaker: Dr George van Cleve, Universities of Virginia and Seattle
Venue: Oxford Law Faculty Senior Common Room
The presentation concerns the so-called "paper money wars" in the United States, 1785-1787 and their effects on the drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution. It focuses particularly on the social and political effects of the paper money controversies that broke out in more than half the American states after the Revolutionary War and how they influenced the constitutional ratification contest. It was an important cause of the collapse of the American Confederation government, 1783-1787.
Dr van Cleve is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Universities of Virginia and Seattle and author of the acclaimed book A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), work that originated in his masters research in Oxford.
Lunch will be provided. An email to the convenors signalling intention to attend will be appreciated (click on convenors' names, below).
For more information please contact: Joshua Getzler, Moira Gillis
Interested in this subject? View our Legal History page.
Organised by the Oxford Legal History Forum
