Between the American Revolution and the American Civil War, New York transitioned from restricting the right to vote based on property qualifications, to restricting it based on race. During that period, New York also developed perhaps the most comprehensive system of public schools in the United States. This talk explains how transformations in education policy drove the expansion of the suffrage for white men and justified the disfranchisement of Black men.

Mark Boonshoft received his B.A. in history from SUNY-Buffalo and his PhD in history from Ohio State University. He is currently Associate Professor and the Conrad M. Hall ’65 Chair in American Constitutional History at Virginia Military Institute. Previously, Boonshoft was the Executive Director of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, a post-doctoral fellow at the New York Public Library, and taught at Norwich University in Vermont. Boonshoft’s first book, Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic, was published by the University of North Carolina Press, and was a finalist for the 2021 George Washington Book Prize.