History Department

Our Faculty:

Courses Taught:

Recent Publications:

Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
"Hardly Sallygate: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the Sex Scandal That Wasn't," in Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals, edited by Juliet A. Williams and Paul Apostolidis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 101-133.
"'Notorious in the Neighborhood': An Interracial Family in Early National and Antebellum Virginia," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 67, no. 1 (February 2001), pp. 73-114.
"James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum Virginia," in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, edited by Jan Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 87-113.

Current Project:

"Slavery and Speculation in the Flush Times: The Heart of Jacksonian America."

My current project is a study of America's southwestern frontier during the economic boom of the 1820s and 1830s known as the "flush times." I am closely examining a series of gambling riots and slave insurrection scares, using them a lens through which to understand the social, cultural, and political implications of expansion and speculative capitalism in the antebellum United States. This project has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Office for Sponsored Programs at the University of Alabama, the Deep South Regional Humanities Center, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Academic Libraries, and a joint award from the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Hobbies:

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