Peter Knupfer

Peter Knupfer is a specialist in 19th century American politics, digital humanities, history education, and applied history. He received his B.S. (Social Studies/History, 1975), M.A. and Ph.D. (History, 1982; 1988) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He served at Maricopa Community College District, Arizona State University, and Kansas State University before coming to MSU in 2000. He was project director for the Mellon/Ford South African National Heritage Training & Technology Program from 2000 to 2004 and Associate Director of MATRIX, MSU’s humanities technology center, from 2000 to 2005. He served as executive director for H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, 2005-2020. From 2003-2016 he co-wrote and participated as a trainer in several in-service training programs for teachers in Detroit and Calhoun, Ingham, and Benzie counties, funded by the federal Department of Education and Michigan Department of Education. Throughout his career, Knupfer wrote over two dozen different college-level lecture and seminar courses in public and local history, military history, and political and business history, with special focus on the American Civil War. He is currently under contract for a documentary volume on the Civil War era for Infobase. He retired from MSU in 2021.

He also plays the fiddle.

His publications include:

“Learning To Read While Reading To Learn: Marcius Willson’s Basal Readers, Science Education, And Object Teaching, 1860–1890,” Paedagogica Historica, International Journal of the History of Education (February, 2021): https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2020.1864423

“How to Write a History Textbook: The Willard-Willson Debate over History Education in the Common School Era,” History of Education Quarterly, 59 No. 2 (May, 2019): 257-287. https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2019.6

“Consultants in the Classroom: Student/Teacher Collaborations in Community History,” Journal of American History, 99, No. 4 (March, 2013): 1161-75. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas602

“A New Focus for the History Professoriate: Professional Development for History Teachers as Professional Development for Historians,” in Rachel G. Ragland and Kelly A. Woestman, eds. The Teaching American History Project: Lessons for History Educators and Historians (New York: Routledge, 2009): 29-46.

“Aging Statesmen and the Statesmanship of an Earlier Age: The Generational Roots of the Constitutional Union Party,” in Race and Politics in the Era of the Civil War: Essays in Honor of Richard H. Sewell, ed. Brooks D. Simpson and David Blight, (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997).

“James Buchanan, the Election of 1860, and the Demise of Jacksonian Politics,” in James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s, ed. Michael J. Birkner (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehannah University Press, 1996).

“Crisis in Conservatism: Northern Unionism and the Harpers Ferry Raid,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. Paul Finkelman, (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1994). An Alternate Selection of the History Book Club.

The Union As It Is: Constitutional Unionism and Sectional Compromise, 1787-1861. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

“Henry Clay’s Constitutional Unionism.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 89 (1) (Winter, 1991): 32-60. Winner of the Richard H. Collins Article Prize, Kentucky Historical Society.

“The Rhetoric of Conciliation: American Civic Culture and the Federalist Defense of Compromise, 1787-1860.” Journal of the Early Republic 11 (3) (Fall, 1991): 315-37.

“A Connecticut Yankee on the Frontier: John Hubbard Tweedy and the Problem of Frontier Whiggery.” The Old Northwest 15 (1, 2) (Spring/Summer 1990): 63-80.