Tentatively entitled Globalization of the United States, 1815-1861, my current book project traces the shift in American understandings of and relationships to the wider world between the American Revolution and the American Civil War.
My first book, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, published in 2009, focused on the cultural, social, economic, and political history of letter writing and communications in the early anglophone Atlantic World. Letter writing steeped the white middle class in imperatives of self-improvement and vulnerabilities of personal agency, while assuring them of their social innocence, their technical credentials, and their moral deserving. The force of this social myopia is as critical as racism, I argue, in explaining the glaring dearth of moral conscience underwriting the legalization of massive violence toward Native Americans and African-Americans so endemic to the eighteenth century.
The College of Arts + Sciences