Rachel Shelden

Education:

PhD, University of Virginia, 2011
MA, University of Virginia, 2006
BA, Stanford University, 2003

Rachel Shelden is a scholar of U.S. political, constitutional, and legal history with a particular interest in how personal relationships and networks shaped the nineteenth-century across time and space. She is the author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), which examines how the social lives of federal politicians in Washington in the 1840s and 1850s created a political fraternity that left them unprepared for and surprised by the secession crisis that arrived during the winter of 1860-1861. Shelden argues that understanding how this political fraternity formed—and the regular rhythm of congressional politics more broadly—requires moving beyond the official spaces of the Capitol building (and the Congressional Globe) and instead looking to the unofficial political spaces in hotels and boardinghouses, at parties and dinners, and in the intimacies of Washington, D.C. Shelden is also co-editor, with Gary Gallagher, of A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political History (University of Virginia Press, 2012). She is the author of articles in a wide variety of history and law journals. Her article “Anatomy of a Presidential Campaign from the Supreme Court Bench: John McLean, Levi Woodbury, and the Election of 1848,” was the winner of the Supreme Court Historical Society’s Hughes-Gossett Award for best article published in the Journal of Supreme Court History in 2022.

Shelden’s current book project, The Political Supreme Court, examines the political activities and political culture of U.S. Supreme Court justices from the early nineteenth century to the 1890s. This project has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Virginia Historical Society, and the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. In 2022 Shelden was named an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She has been a contributor to news outlets such as the Washington Post, The Atlantic, BBC News, Al Jazeera, NPR, and CSPAN. Shelden also serves on the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice.

As Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, Shelden oversees Penn State’s institute for cutting-edge scholarship on slavery, race, and democracy in the mid-nineteenth century and beyond. Among other scholarly activities, the Center runs fellowships for graduate students, postdoctoral students, and professors; offers internships for undergraduate students; and hosts the annual Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era.

Recent Academic Publications:

“Finding Meaning in the Congressional Globe: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Problem of Constitutional Archives,” Journal of American Constitutional History 2 (Summer 2024), 715-733.

“Dismantling the Party System: Party Fluidity and the Mechanisms of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Politics,”

(with Erik Alexander), Journal of American History 110 (December 2023), 419-448.

“‘I shall not entirely forget or forsake politics on the Bench’: Abraham Lincoln, Dred Scott, and the Political Culture of the Judiciary in the 1850s,” Maryland Law Review 83 (November 2023), 217-230.

“Anatomy of a Presidential Campaign from the Supreme Court Bench: John McLean, Levi Woodbury, and the Election of 1848,” Journal of Supreme Court History 47 (December 2022), 241-264.

“Contesting the Constitution: Constitutional Politics, Then and Now,” Reviews in American History 48:4 (December 2020): 515-521.

“The Politics of Continuity and Change in the Long Civil War Era,” Civil War History 65 (December 2019): 319-341

Guest Editor, Special Issue on Federalism in the Civil War Era, Journal of the Civil War Era, 9 (December 2019)

Recent Courses: