Troy Kickler is the founder of the North Carolina History Project.
He holds an M.S. in Social Studies Education from North Carolina A&T State University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Tennessee. He has taught at the University of Tennessee, Barton College, and North Carolina State University, and Liberty University.
Kickler is author of The King’s Trouble Makers: Edenton’s Role in Creating a Nation and State. He is also co-editor, with Jeff Broadwater, of North Carolina’s Revolutionary Founders (University of North Carolina Press). He is also editor of an upcoming research volume Nathaniel Macon: Selected Congressional Speeches and Correspondence.
Some of Kickler’s publications include “Caught in the Crossfire: African American Children and the Ideological Battle for Education in Reconstruction Tennessee” (in Children and Youth During the Civil War Era, ed. James Marten, New York University Press: 2012) and “Why The Constitution is Essential,” as part of State Policy Network’s We The People series. He is currently working on a study of Andrew Jackson’s leadership style.
Dr. Kickler has been invited and has written various forewords and introductions to scholarly works. Such publications include Riot and Resistance in County Norfolk, 1646-1650, The Impact of the English Colonization of Ireland in the Sixteenth Century, and The Federalist Papers: A Reader’s Guide.
He has written articles and reviews for such publications as American Diplomacy, Chronicles, Constituting America, Imaginative Conservative, Independent Review, Journal of Mississippi History, Modern Age, Tennessee Baptist History, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and The Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians.
Kickler has presented at numerous academic conferences and venues including the American Political Science Association and the First Principles Program of Intercollegiate Studies Institute. In addition, he has presented dozens of lectures to civic groups across North Carolina exploring, respectively, the history of North Carolina and the United States and the North Carolina Constitution and United States Constitution.
His commentaries have appeared in major North Carolina newspaper outlets, and he has been interviewed for several North Carolina talk-radio stations and news programs. He also has blogged for History News Network. Kickler has a monthly column for Carolina Journal.
Directing several educational programs, Kickler was co-creator of the popular A Citizen’s Constitutional Workshop. He lso directed the John Locke Foundation’s State of Our Constitution symposia series, a program created to foster state constitutional literacy.
He serves on various boards, including the Scholarly Advisory Board of The Religion in North Carolina Digital Collection, a collaborative project of Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest University, and the College Level Advisory Board of Constituting America, an online essay series exploring the U.S. Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and the Founding Era.
Catawba Indians
Once an eminent Siouan tribe that thrived in the middle Carolinas, the Catawba Nation first encountered white settlers through the fur trade. Both war and European disease proved fatal to the Catawba, and by 1760, only 1,000 tribe members survived. The tribe, now numbering over 2,800 members, gained full federal recognition in 1993, and they live on a reservation near Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Melville B. Cox (1799 – 1833)
A minister at Edenton Street Methodist Church in Raleigh, Melville Cox left his post in 1831 to travel to Liberia. There, he served as the first Methodist missionary from the United States to a foreign country.
How North Carolina Came to Be Shaped As It Is Today
When did North Carolina become known as North Carolina and acquire its modern shape? We must go back to Jan. 24, 1712, when Edward Hyde became the first governor of what became known as North Carolina, or more specifically, he was the first official governor under the Lords Proprietors. Carolina was then divided into two...