Department Faculty

“I am a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, writing about slavery and emancipation. I am especially interested in exploring the intersections where political history and social history meet--the struggles, crises, ideas, and everyday practices that shaped American politics and were shaped by it. I am presently finishing a book about the ideology of slaves in the Natchez District of Mississippi. It explores how slaves thought about power in their society by examining what they did and said at work, in intimate relations between men and women, and struggles with owners, their agents, and other slaves. I have also started work on a book about Nat Turner's famous revolt in 1831. I continue to collaborate as well with my former colleagues at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland on our history, in essays and documents, of former slaves' struggles over the terms of wage labor in 1866 and 1867. I am a member of the faculty of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, associate editor of the journal Civil War History, and a participant in Breaking the Silence, a UNESCO project to encourage the teaching of slavery in the Atlantic world to young people in the United States, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. One of the great pleasures of this project is the opportunity to work closely with other colleagues in the history department here at Penn State and with K-12 teachers in State College and across the country.”