My current research projects expand my study of these economic practices and cultural debates both chronologically and geographically. In my next book, I examine the ways in which the Civil War forced soldiers, entrepreneurs, and consumers to negotiate the practices, power dynamics, and worldviews that were coming to constitute the nation’s culture of capitalism. While soldiers may have fought for a number of different ideological reasons, they often made meaning of their experiences and articulated who they were by writing and thinking about money, goods, and economic transactions. The nation’s burgeoning culture of commercial persuasionfound in advertisements, lithographs, and print mediashaped soldiers’ outlooks, and enlisted men remained crucial participants in family economies by taking advantage of the distributive capacities of express companies that facilitated the transfer of wage packets and consumer products between camp and home. Soldiers created markets among themselves, trading products and services in camp to make profits or make ends meet. Sutlers and agents of distant businessmen helped to shape those camp markets by selling products designed specifically for soldiers. Other entrepreneurs, selling everything from suits of clothes to board games, commodified soldiers and their experiences for eager consumers on the home front. In army camps and in the underground markets created by bounty and substitute brokers, soldiers encountered the process of commodification that was coming to define wage labor relations. At the intersection of markets created by, for, and in soldiers, we can recognize how the culture of capitalism and the Civil Warthe two most significant transformative forces in nineteenth-century American lifewere intertwined with each other. I have also begun research and made a few presentations on the life and times of a fascinating and nefarious slave trader and swindler named Monroe Edwards. Edwards’ transatlantic career exposes the ways a variety of people sought to achieve ambitions through competing speculationsfounded in economic fraud, diplomatic negotiations, and political corruptionabout slavery, the slave trade, and the Republic of Texas in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837.
Grad Students Advised
- Andrew Mach
- Jessica Mathias
- HIST 152: Survey of American History to 1865
- HIST 257: Antebellum America, 1781-1861
- HIST 358/558: American Cultural History
- HIST 453: The Civil War and Reconstruction
- HIST 466: Early American Capitalism
- HIST 474: The City in American History
- HIST 484: Historical Research Capstone ((Topics include Social and Cultural History of 19th-Century America; the Civil War; and the Nineteenth-Century American City)
- HIST 757: Graduate Readings in U. S. History, 1776-1900
- HIST 758: Graduate Research Seminar in American History, 1776-1900
On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York University Press, 2010).
“Jumping Counters in White Collars: Manliness, Respectability, and Work in the Antebellum City,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (Summer 2006): 173-219.
“What Is My Prospects?: The Contours of Mercantile Apprenticeship, Ambition, and Advancement in the Early American Economy,” Business History Review 78 (Winter 2004): 665-702. (Winner of the 2004 Newcomen-Harvard Special Award in Business History)
“Riot and Respectability: The Shifting Terrain of Class Language and Status in Baltimore during the Great Strike of 1877,” American Nineteenth Century History 4 (Fall 2003): 61-96.