About Me
I am the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Previously, I was an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama (2014-2022), the 2020-2021 Vann Professor of Ethics in Society at Davidson College, Davidson, NC, and an Assistant Professor of History at Elizabeth City State University (2010-2014).
I earned my B.A. in History with minors in Africana Studies and Pre-Healing Arts from Franklin and Marshall College; M.A. in History from Tufts University; and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, Civil War Memory, the US South, 19th Century America, and the Atlantic World.
Entitled Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), my first book explored how African Americans and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American education schools during the transition from slavery to freedom in Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama. Most significantly, it demonstrates how the struggle for African American education did not end with the creation of public schools but rather it was transformed as urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city, county, and state educational partners. Through their demands, they achieved success in securing African American teachers, creating of normal schools, associations and other auxiliary educational resources, and establishing a robust liberal arts curriculum that had enduring effects on later public schools. While they were less successfully in terms of securing adequate funding and school board positions, the first twenty-years of state funded schools represented a continued realization of the gains made since emancipation through education for African Americans in Richmond and Mobile. It did not represent a “nadir”.
My in-progress second book project under contract with Fordham University Press, tentatively titled Unforgettable Sacrifice examines how African Americans remembered and commemorated the American Civil War and its legacy. Recognizing the diversity of the community, African Americans experienced the war as enslaved and free, but also as soldier, contraband, and/or civilian in both the United States and the Confederate States of America. As a result, geographic place, status before war, gender, and wartime experience produced a rich tapestry of collective memories that are not neatly encapsulated within the traditional scholarly categories of Emancipationist, Reconciliationist, or even the Won Cause. Rather the case studies presented in this volume seek to demonstrate the origins, diversity, and evolution of Civil War memory among everyday African Americans. Unforgettable Sacrifice will argue that African Americans, whether nationally, regionally, and/or locally, sought a usable past that honored the service and sacrifice of veterans, the diverse wartime civilian experiences, and the destruction of slavery to advance communal notions of patriotism, democracy, and their full inclusion as American citizens.
In addition, I have published book reviews, encyclopedia entries, and chapters in The Urban South During the Civil War Era, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Epidemics and War: The Impact of Disease on Major Conflicts in History, ed. Rebecca Seaman. (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2018), Reconciliation after Civil Wars: Global Perspectives, ed. Paul Quigley and Jim Hawdon (New York: Routledge, 2019) and Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction ands its Meanings 150 Years Later, ed. Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis. My article entitled “At Freedom’s Margins: Race, Disability, Violence and the Brewer Orphan Asylum in Southeastern North Carolina, 1865-1872” received the 2016 Lawrence Brewster Faculty Paper Award from the North Carolina Association of Historians. I have several pieces in various stages exploring African American memory of the Civil War, the Confederate monument removal debate, 2015-2020, and the enslaved experience at the University of Alabama, including the "The Burden of the University of Alabama's Hallowed Grounds," The Public Historian 42, no. 4 (November 2020): 28-40.
In terms of public history, I have published a variety of public historical publications, consulted on documentaries and exhibitions, and developed resources for museums and national agencies. I have co-authored with Keith S. Hebert, Historic Resource Study of African American Schools in the South, 1865-1900. Prepared for the National Park Service in Cooperation with the Organization of American Historians (Washington: National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior, 2022).
Actively researching since January 2015, I developed the Hallowed Grounds Project which explores the history of race, slavery, and memory at the University of Alabama and the post-emancipation developments in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This ongoing scholarly project seeks to make accessible visualizations, transcriptions, primary sources, and other materials for understanding the history of slavery at the University of Alabama and its legacy. It is designed for current students, alumni, faculty, staff and descendants who want to deepen their understanding on this under-appreciated campus history through campus tours, academic courses, and a sustainable Digital Humanities (DH) presence. Several book chapters and an Omeka-S DH project is in the works. The in-person tours still persist even though I am no longer an UA employee.
I am an active member of several professional organizations, including the American Historical Association, Society of Civil War Historians, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Association of Black Women Historians, African American Intellectual History Society, the North Carolina Association of Historians. Currently, I am Digital Media Editor responsible for Muster, the blog for theJournal of Civil War Era and the Chief Reader for AP US History.
I am the co-series editor with J. Brent Morris of the Reconstruction Reconsidered, a University of South Carolina Press book series. Authors interested in submitting proposals should visit USCPress.com and the contact either J. Brent Morris, series editor ([email protected]), Hilary Green ([email protected]) or Ehren Foley, USC Press acquisitions editor ([email protected]).
My scholarly passion grew out of my formal and informal educational experience as a native Bostonian who attended the Brockton Public Schools and regularly vacationed in south-central Pennsylvania and the Charleston, SC Lowcountry.
I earned my B.A. in History with minors in Africana Studies and Pre-Healing Arts from Franklin and Marshall College; M.A. in History from Tufts University; and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, Civil War Memory, the US South, 19th Century America, and the Atlantic World.
Entitled Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), my first book explored how African Americans and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American education schools during the transition from slavery to freedom in Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama. Most significantly, it demonstrates how the struggle for African American education did not end with the creation of public schools but rather it was transformed as urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city, county, and state educational partners. Through their demands, they achieved success in securing African American teachers, creating of normal schools, associations and other auxiliary educational resources, and establishing a robust liberal arts curriculum that had enduring effects on later public schools. While they were less successfully in terms of securing adequate funding and school board positions, the first twenty-years of state funded schools represented a continued realization of the gains made since emancipation through education for African Americans in Richmond and Mobile. It did not represent a “nadir”.
My in-progress second book project under contract with Fordham University Press, tentatively titled Unforgettable Sacrifice examines how African Americans remembered and commemorated the American Civil War and its legacy. Recognizing the diversity of the community, African Americans experienced the war as enslaved and free, but also as soldier, contraband, and/or civilian in both the United States and the Confederate States of America. As a result, geographic place, status before war, gender, and wartime experience produced a rich tapestry of collective memories that are not neatly encapsulated within the traditional scholarly categories of Emancipationist, Reconciliationist, or even the Won Cause. Rather the case studies presented in this volume seek to demonstrate the origins, diversity, and evolution of Civil War memory among everyday African Americans. Unforgettable Sacrifice will argue that African Americans, whether nationally, regionally, and/or locally, sought a usable past that honored the service and sacrifice of veterans, the diverse wartime civilian experiences, and the destruction of slavery to advance communal notions of patriotism, democracy, and their full inclusion as American citizens.
In addition, I have published book reviews, encyclopedia entries, and chapters in The Urban South During the Civil War Era, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Epidemics and War: The Impact of Disease on Major Conflicts in History, ed. Rebecca Seaman. (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2018), Reconciliation after Civil Wars: Global Perspectives, ed. Paul Quigley and Jim Hawdon (New York: Routledge, 2019) and Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction ands its Meanings 150 Years Later, ed. Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis. My article entitled “At Freedom’s Margins: Race, Disability, Violence and the Brewer Orphan Asylum in Southeastern North Carolina, 1865-1872” received the 2016 Lawrence Brewster Faculty Paper Award from the North Carolina Association of Historians. I have several pieces in various stages exploring African American memory of the Civil War, the Confederate monument removal debate, 2015-2020, and the enslaved experience at the University of Alabama, including the "The Burden of the University of Alabama's Hallowed Grounds," The Public Historian 42, no. 4 (November 2020): 28-40.
In terms of public history, I have published a variety of public historical publications, consulted on documentaries and exhibitions, and developed resources for museums and national agencies. I have co-authored with Keith S. Hebert, Historic Resource Study of African American Schools in the South, 1865-1900. Prepared for the National Park Service in Cooperation with the Organization of American Historians (Washington: National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior, 2022).
Actively researching since January 2015, I developed the Hallowed Grounds Project which explores the history of race, slavery, and memory at the University of Alabama and the post-emancipation developments in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This ongoing scholarly project seeks to make accessible visualizations, transcriptions, primary sources, and other materials for understanding the history of slavery at the University of Alabama and its legacy. It is designed for current students, alumni, faculty, staff and descendants who want to deepen their understanding on this under-appreciated campus history through campus tours, academic courses, and a sustainable Digital Humanities (DH) presence. Several book chapters and an Omeka-S DH project is in the works. The in-person tours still persist even though I am no longer an UA employee.
I am an active member of several professional organizations, including the American Historical Association, Society of Civil War Historians, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Association of Black Women Historians, African American Intellectual History Society, the North Carolina Association of Historians. Currently, I am Digital Media Editor responsible for Muster, the blog for theJournal of Civil War Era and the Chief Reader for AP US History.
I am the co-series editor with J. Brent Morris of the Reconstruction Reconsidered, a University of South Carolina Press book series. Authors interested in submitting proposals should visit USCPress.com and the contact either J. Brent Morris, series editor ([email protected]), Hilary Green ([email protected]) or Ehren Foley, USC Press acquisitions editor ([email protected]).
My scholarly passion grew out of my formal and informal educational experience as a native Bostonian who attended the Brockton Public Schools and regularly vacationed in south-central Pennsylvania and the Charleston, SC Lowcountry.