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Citizens, States, and the Nation

A special event for Constitution Week.

The United States’ Constitution was written to balance the rights and the authority of three different constituencies - individual citizens, state governments, and the national government.  This discussion will focus on how the Founders intended that balance to work and how the balance has shifted over the years since the Constitution was written.

This event is in celebration of Constitution Week. 

Daniel Thorp earned both a masters and doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University before beginning to teach history at Virginia Tech, where he is currently an associate professor of history and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Academic Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. He has also taught at East Carolina University and at Sunderland University, in England, and spent six months as a Fulbright Scholar in Wellington, New Zealand.  Though trained as a colonial historian, he also teaches the history of the American West and introductory surveys of the history of the United States. He is the author of two dozen articles on a range of topics in eighteenth and nineteenth-century American history and three books: The Moravian Community in Colonial North Carolina, Lewis & Clark: An American Journey, and Facing Freedom: An African American Community in Virginia, from Reconstruction to Jim Crow. 

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