About Me
I am an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. For the 2020-2021 academic year, I am the Vann Professor of Ethics in Society at Davidson College, Davidson, NC.
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.
Titled 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, tentatively titled Lest We Forget (it will most likely change) 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. Lest We Forget 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) and Reconciliation after Civil Wars: Global Perspectives, ed. Paul Quigley and Jim Hawdon (New York: Routledge, 2019). 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.
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 underappreciated campus history through campus tours, academic courses, and a sustainable Digital Humanities (DH) presence.
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 and the North Carolina Association of Historians. Currently, I serve as the book review editor for the Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians and the Digital Media Editor responsible for Muster, the blog for theJournal of Civil War Era.
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 (morrisj1@uscb.edu), Hilary Green (hngreen1@ua.edu) or Ehren Foley, USC Press acquisitions editor (foleyek@email.sc.edu).
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.
Titled 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, tentatively titled Lest We Forget (it will most likely change) 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. Lest We Forget 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) and Reconciliation after Civil Wars: Global Perspectives, ed. Paul Quigley and Jim Hawdon (New York: Routledge, 2019). 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.
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 underappreciated campus history through campus tours, academic courses, and a sustainable Digital Humanities (DH) presence.
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 and the North Carolina Association of Historians. Currently, I serve as the book review editor for the Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians and the Digital Media Editor responsible for Muster, the blog for theJournal of Civil War Era.
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 (morrisj1@uscb.edu), Hilary Green (hngreen1@ua.edu) or Ehren Foley, USC Press acquisitions editor (foleyek@email.sc.edu).
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.