Biography

Selected Publications

Books:

The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade. (University of Virginia Press, 2016).

Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). A recipient of the 2001 Fletcher Pratt Award, given by the Civil War Round Table of New York for the best non-fiction book on the American Civil War published in 2001.

Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994). A recipient of the 1995 Elliott Rudwick Prize, chosen as the Finalist for the 1995 Lincoln Prize, and selected as a Notable Book of the Year for 1994 by the The New York Times Book Review. A Norton paperback edition, 1995.

Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966; revised edition, forthcoming, Library of Virginia, 1998). A Recipient of a 1967 Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History A Recipient of the 1966 Fletcher Pratt Award, given by the Civil War Round Table of New York.

Articles and Essays:
“Industrial Slavery, in Stanley L. Engerman and Seymour Drescher, eds., Encyclopedia of Slavery” (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997).

“Slavery and Technology in the Antebellum Southern Iron Industry: The Case of Buffalo Forge, in Ronald L. Numbers and Todd L. Savitt, eds., Science and Medicine in the Old South” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 107-126.

“The Slavery Experience, in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 120-161.

“Sam Williams, Forgeman: The Life of an Industrial Slave in the Old South, in James M. McPherson and J. Morgan Kousser eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 199-239.

Research Interests

Ante-Bellum U.S. History; Slavery in the U.S.; U.S. South

Theses Advised

Jackson Myers ’17 – “A New Era in our Politicks”: John C. Calhoun and the Legacy of the Founders, 1811-1817

Joshua Morrison ’16 – Labor Race, and Food: Mary Chesnut’s Reconstruction

Nataly Garzon ’14 – Pioneering White, Black and Brown:  Textile Labor in Greenville, South Carolina

Nathaniel Sutton 14 – Sandusky County, Ohio:  A Community at War

Thomas Daubert ’13 – A Cause Not Lost: The Unyielding Struggle of Confederate Veterans to Preserve White Supremacy During North Carolina’s Reconstruction

Kevin O’Connell ’13 – Ideology and Infrastructure:  Internal Improvements & the American Constitution

Williams Harron ’11 – The Northern Home Front and Lee’s Gettysburg Invasion

Mary Freeman ’11 – Letters Home: Common Soldiers in the American Civil War

Margot Bernstein ’10 – Preston Smith Brooks in the Verbal and the Visual: Showing Face to Save Face and Avoid Disgrace in the Antebellum South

Ben Davidson ’10 – ‘Arches of Fire’: The Civil War and its Aftermath in the Minds of White Southern Children

Kevin Waite ’09 – The Masculine Divide: Violence, Manhood, and Nationalism in the Plain Folk South, 1820-1861

Nick Carter ’07 – Contesting Cultural Explanations of Poverty:  Migration and Economic Development in New Orleans, 1965-1980

Emma Reynolds ’07 – “Let Us Persevere in the Good Work”:  The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the American Civil War

Kevin Koernig ’05 – Resolute Scheme:  How Ulysses S. Grant Won the Civil War

Stokley Weinberg 02 – The 54th Massachusetts Regiment:  Fighting for Equality

David Gise ’01 – The Indispensable Men:  Grant, Sherman, and Union Victory

Jonathan Eades ’95 – Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet:  A Study in the Historiography of the American Civil War

Amy Hansen ’94 – Redefining Mastery:  Civil War and Reconstruction Transition Through the Eyes of Samuel A. Agnew, Mississippi Planter

Graham Gerst ’93 – French Foreign Policy and the Belgian Revolution of 1830
(with John Hyde)

Lewis Collins ’88 – John Singleton Mosby and Confederate Guerrilla Warfare in the Civil War