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Publications
“Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human
Property,” Journal of Southern History,
November, 2010.
This
manuscript provides a much broader view of the
emotional and economic impact of using people as
collateral than was possible in the dissertation
described below, and it places the topic within
wider historiographical conversations.
Examination of over 75,000 pages of public
records produced data on 8800 mortgages. More
than 27,000 slaves in Virginia, South Carolina,
and Louisiana were used as human collateral. It
now is clear that Spanish, French, and British
colonists, and their descendants living in the
U.S., actively used human collateral, much as we
use home purchase and equity mortgages today.
These contracts generated significant cash and
credit, billions in today's dollars, capital
that could be used to buy more land and slaves.
This was particularly important on frontiers,
where specie, credit, and laborers were least
available and most in demand. At the same time,
such mortgages put enslaved people at risk of
foreclosure and forced separation from their
families. I have written in a style that I hope
will invite my fellow social historians into the
conversation, while still raising issues of
interest to economic and legal specialists.
Co-organizer of
Symposium and Co-editor of Book of Essays
A symposium and
a publishing project have grown out of my
course in comparative slavery.
As
co-organizer and
co-editor with James F. Brooks, President &
CEO of the School for Advanced Research and
recipient of the 2003 Frederick Douglass
Prize,
I am currently reviewing
proposals Uniting the Histories of
Slavery in North America, A Joint
Symposium in 2012-2013, sponsored by The
William P. Clements Center for Southwest
Studies and The School for Advanced
Research.
A workshop for
paper contributors will be held in the Fall
of 2012 at The School of Advanced Research
in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to be followed in
Spring 2013 by a symposium at Southern
Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. We
hope to unite the stories of slavery by
bringing together historians who focus on
slavery east and west of the Mississippi and
in the northern, southern, and Pacific U.S.
borderlands. We also want to show
how studies on past slavery and contemporary
human trafficking inform our understanding
of each. We have special interest in the
following topics: (1) Striking parallels as
well as fascinating differences in the
dynamics of slavery among Indians and
Euro-Americans; (2) Shared dynamics between
North American slavery, transnational
migration, and contemporary human
trafficking; (3) Peoples of mixed descent as
cultural, economic, and military
intermediaries, brokering the exchange of
resources; (4) Music, dance, and other forms
of cultural/artistic expression (art, dance,
poetry, etc.) play powerful parts in
cultural contests generally, and in slavery
particularly.
In the works
Sven Beckert (Harvard University) and Seth
Rockman (Brown University) have launched a
publishing project on slavery and economic
development in the post-revolutionary United
States. I was among the scholars invited to
submit a proposal for a collection of essays on
fresh approaches to this topic, and my work was
cited as an example of the kind of cutting-edge
research they were seeking. I presented the
essay draft of “Neighbor to Neighbor: How Local
Networks Built Economies by Mortgaging Slaves,”
at “Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of
American Economic Development,” a conference
held at Brown University and Harvard University,
April 7-9, 2011. We recently learned that the
University of Pennsylvania Press is interested
in publishing the volume
in its Early American Studies series.
Interdisciplinary
Workshops Organized
“Waves of Spiritual Conquest,” a conversation
among scholars of Theology, Religious Studies,
and
History at Southern Methodist University,
compared conversion strategies and efficacies
over
time and space. Discussion ranged from
comparisons of conversion strategies and their
results,
to the spread of reform Buddhism, to
how the beatas of sixteenth-century Peru
challenged
religious authority, and to the
success of Pentecostalism in modern Latin
America. March, 2007.
“Becoming Indigenous...Again,” brought together
faculty and graduate students in History and
Anthropology at Southern Methodist University
for a conversation on the distinctive ways each
discipline analyzes the process of how peoples
come to belong, and to be perceived to belong by
scholars, in geographic spaces. October, 2004.
Teaching
Experience
“Life in Early American Cities.” Southern
Methodist University. Southern Methodist
University. Spring, 2011.
What was it like to live in the towns and
villages that dotted the North American
landscape in the 17th, 18th,
and early 19th centuries? What
sights and sounds did everyone share? How was
life different if you were rich or poor, male of
female? If you were apprenticed or enslaved?
This course begins with the trial of a
29-year-old enslaved Afro-Portuguese woman, who
was accused of arson in colonial Montreal. It
concludes with the aspirations of Californios
living in Los Angeles in the decades before the
Civil War. In between, we sample life in cities
like Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans,
learning what opportunities and obstacles they
offered.
“All in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, John
Marshall, & Conflicting Dreams for a New
Nation.”
Southern Methodist University. Fall,
2010.
Before and during the American Revolution,
rebels from all levels of colonial society had
built a coalition around concepts like
“liberty,” “equality,” and resistance to outside
control. After the war, this coalition started
to unravel as these men and women began to
imagine and build a government. Their earlier
agreement on broad meanings of liberty and
equality frayed into animosity when it came time
to turn definitions into laws. Now the same
rules would bind everyone: the wealthy and the
poor, those living on coasts and those in Indian
country, women and men, as well as the free and
the unfree. This course uses the diverging
dreams of cousins and nation-builders Thomas
Jefferson and John Marshall to introduce major
differences in vision among Americans in the
founding generation.
“Out of Many: U.S. History to 1877,” the first
half of the survey in American History.
Southern Methodist University. Fall, 2010. 2
sections
“Out of Many: U.S. History to 1877,” the first
half of the survey in American History.
Southern Methodist University. Spring, 2010.
“American
Slaveries: The Southwest, the Gulf Coast, and
the Southeast,” an upper level course based on
the Junior Seminar, “North American Slaveries,”
taught at Yale University and described
immediately below. Southern Methodist
University. Spring 2010.
“North American Slaveries: The Southwest to the
Southeast,” a junior seminar. Yale
University. A comparative history course
focused on slavery as an economic and social
system across the 18th-century
South. Because few visual representations
survive from this period, a music archive from
selected Native American, African American, and
European peoples supplemented primary and
secondary readings and illustrated how all these
American culture groups used music for military
intimidation, religious worship, and cultural
incorporation. Spring 2009.
“American Slaveries: The Southwest, the Gulf
Coast, and the Southeast,” a comparative slavery
course of my own design traced the economic and
social manifestations of slavery in New Mexico,
Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina in
the 18th and 19th
centuries. Taught while a Research Fellow at
Southern Methodist University. Spring, 2007.
“The Unfinished Nation, 1865 to the Present,”
The second half of the Survey Course in American
History at Southern Methodist University.
Summer, 2005.
“Modern Revolutions in Comparative Perspective,”
Teaching Assistant to Professor John Mears in
the graduate level course, at Southern Methodist
University. Spring, 2005.
“The American Southwest,” Teaching Assistant to
Professor David Weber in the undergraduate level
course, at Southern Methodist University.
Spring, 1999.
Additional Professional
Experience
Pro bono Family Law Attorney, affiliated
with Houston Volunteer Lawyers. Counsel for
poor women and women suddenly made poor by
divorce. September, 1986 – June, 1989.
Presentations:
“Silver Buckles & Signed Contracts: The Changing
Decorum of Lending in Virginia Communities,” to
be presented at the Annual Meeting of the
American Historical Association. Chicago,
January, 2012.
“Neighbor to Neighbor: How Local
Networks Built Economies by Mortgaging Slaves,”
“Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American
Economic Development,” Brown
University and Harvard University, April 7-9,
2011.
“An Atlantic Culture of Credit
Anchored in the Louisiana Backcountry,”16th
Annual Institute Conference of the Omohundro
Institute for Early American History and
Culture, University of Mississippi, June, 2010.
“The Color of Credit: A Lending
Network of Free People of Color in Early
Louisiana,” “Charting New Courses in the History
of Slavery and Emancipation,” a conference
organized by the Center for the Study of the
Gulf South at The University of Southern
Mississippi and The Department of History at The
University of South Alabama. Long Beach,
Mississippi, March, 2010.
“Mortgaging Slaves in North
America and South Africa: Parallels in Funding
Slavery and Slave Societies,” “Bridging Two
Oceans: Slavery in Indian and Atlantic Worlds,”
an international conference organized by the
Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery
and Emancipation, University of Hull, UK. Cape
Town, South Africa, November, 2009.
“Human
Collateral: Slavery’s Invisible Engine,” Third
Annual Cassius Marcellus Clay Lecture,
Department of History, Yale University. April,
2009.
“New Twists in the Old Plotlines
of Slavery: Mortgaging Slaves on the Louisiana
Frontier,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of
American Historians. Seattle, March, 2009.
“The Unsettling Mortgage Story
You Haven't Heard: Raising Cash & Credit
with Slave Collateral,” Gilder Lehrman Center
for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and
Abolition, Yale University. February, 2009.
“Banks, Building Societies, and
Speculators: Profiting from Human Collateral in
19th-Century South Carolina,” Annual Meeting of
the American Historical Association. New York,
January, 2009.
"The Power of Human Collateral:
Mortgaging Slaves in the Colonial and Antebellum
South," Legal History Colloquium, at New York
University School of Law. October, 2008.
“Frontier Bonanzas &
Catastrophes: Mortgaging Slaves in British
Virginia and Spanish Louisiana,”
Slavery and the Law Workshop,
sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the
Study of
Slavery, Resistance, and
Abolition, Yale University. May, 2008.
“History, Poetry & Economics:
Mortgaging Slaves in British Colonial Virginia,”
Annual Meeting of The Pacific Coast Conference
on British Studies, The Huntington Library in
San Marino, California. March, 2008.
“Profits and Perils: Mortgaging Slaves in
Virginia, South Carolina, & Louisiana in the
Nineteenth Century,” Annual Conference of the
Southern Historical Association in Richmond,
Virginia. November, 2007.
“Poetry and Peril: Mortgaging
Slaves in 18th- and 19th-century
America,” Co-sponsored by the Workshop in
American Studies and the Colonial Americas
Workshop, Princeton University. October, 2007.
“Shared Strategies, Common
Tragedies: Mortgaging Slaves in Spanish
Louisiana and British Virginia,” Thirteenth
Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute for
Early American History and Culture held jointly
with the Fifth Biennial Conference with the
Society of Early Americanists, Richmond,
Virginia. June, 2007.
“Tearing Off the Toga and the
Homburg: An Outsider’s Impressions of Law Codes
in Western Europe’s Early Middle Ages,” Annual
Conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, Tempe, Arizona.
February, 2004.
“Show Me the Money! Mortgaging
Slaves on Two Southern Frontiers,” Annual
Meeting of the Organization of American
Historians. Memphis, Tennessee. April, 2003.
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