I became interested in history through my family and its troubled past. My paternal grandmother was born in Tennessee in 1885, the daughter of an elderly Confederate officer and slaveholder (and his second, much younger, wife). When I was in high school, the series “Roots” was shown on television, and my normally softspoken grandmother became furious about the way in which the Old South was depicted. She assured me that they meaning the planter class “were always kind to our people,” an inadvertent admission that African American slaves were indeed human property. I think that’s when I decided to write and teach about race relations in the early American South.
I moved east from Arizona and received my M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgetown. I never lost my interest in the South, which in fact was far more complex and complicated than I ever imagined. My work deals with the intersections between race and politics in early America.
Books in order of publication:
Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism (1989)
Gabriel’s Rebellion (1993)
He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (1999)
Rebels, Reformers and Revolutionaries (2002)
Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (2009)
Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War (2010)
The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (2014)
Thunder At the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (2016)
A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson – 2025
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