What inspired you to pursue a career in history, and how did you develop your specific research interests?
My mother would swear that my interest in early American history (especially the nineteenth century) was natal. But my inspiration to this career path was entirely circumstantial. I was a high school teacher and coach in central Illinois. I was quite happy with it because I had wanted to be a teacher since the sixth grade. However, the history I was teaching felt uninspired because it came mainly from a textbook that students were loathe to read. So, I used every opportunity to read and introduce meaningful historical knowledge into those lessons. (I also taught American literature, so teaching books, short stories, and poems by Hawthorne, Whitman, Twain, Cather, and Faulkner in many ways proved more satisfying than teaching straight-up US history.) But I remember wanting to do my own research, to immerse myself in topics I loved. Taking relevant summer classes at nearby universities sufficed for a while. Research in those classes really inspired me, as did deepening my knowledge base. I didn’t want to be a school administrator, which requires graduate studies in Educational Administration, but I hadn’t thought at all about getting an advanced degree in History. On two successive days, one summer, two professors followed me out of my final exams, and both asked me my story after being impressed by my writing. Each then encouraged me to think about an academic career at the collegiate level in History. As I tell my sons, you should follow your talent as much as your passion. History had always been a passion, but these two professors unexpectedly suggested I had a talent. When the graduate director at the University of Illinois called me out of the blue in August and said they had a sudden opening for a teaching assistantship and that my name had been given to him (presumably by one or both of those faculty members) and offered it to me (I couldn’t take it immediately), I began to think about doing this for real. So I decided to take a chance. I left my teaching job in January and started full-time graduate work.
How do your courses contribute to students’ understanding of the relationship between law, history, and society?
This is, at once, an easy and hard question to answer. Is history conceivable without law? Certainly not the history of our Western world. Neither medieval nor modern history can be written or understood without careful attention to legal institutions. From feudalism to capitalism, from the Magna Carta to the constitutions of contemporary Europe and the US, historians encounter law at every decisive turn. Encounters between history and law are especially frequent in the history of political thought. I teach mainly in the nineteenth century. Considering the coming and the outcomes of the American Civil War cannot be done without understanding the foundational relationship between slavery, government, politics, and law (whether in theory or application).
Can you share a specific example from your research or teaching illustrating how legal institutions, laws, or norms have shaped cultural or social change in a particular historical context?
That’s easy. My research has located itself in the liminal border space between the North and South and the East and West, where the important intersection of antebellum sectional politics and westward expansion played out most obviously.
The Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), is central to understanding how slavery was a national rather than simply a sectional problem. In 1846, an enslaved Black man named Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet sued for their freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court. They claimed that they were free due to their residence in a free territory where slavery was prohibited. The odds were in their favor. They had lived with their enslaver, an army surgeon, at Fort Snelling, then in the free Territory of Wisconsin (now the state of Minnesota). The Scotts’ freedom could be established on the grounds that they had been held in bondage for extended periods in a free territory and were then returned to a slave state. Courts had ruled this way in the past. However, what appeared to be a straightforward lawsuit between two private parties became an 11-year legal struggle culminating in one of the most notorious (meaning politicized) decisions ever issued by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).
Scott lost his initial case, which had worked through the Missouri state courts; he then filed a new federal suit, ultimately reaching the Supreme Court. On its way to the Supreme Court, the Dred Scott case grew in scope and significance as slavery became the most explosive issue in American politics. By the time the case reached SCOTUS, it had come to have enormous political implications for the entire nation. On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the court’s majority opinion, which stated that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts. The opinion also stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a federal territory. This decision moved the nation a step closer to the Civil War. The decision of Scott v. Sandford, considered by many legal scholars to be the worst ever rendered by the Supreme Court, was overturned by the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and declared all persons born in the United States to be citizens of the United States. Dred Scott tells us plenty about how race, slavery, citizenship, and law intersected at this pivotal moment in US history.
How do you incorporate interdisciplinary approaches, such as political, economic, or cultural perspectives, into your research and teaching, especially in relation to legal systems, norms, and procedures?
I am not a legal scholar. But historians realize that, in one way or another, they are storytellers. As storytellers, they operate with a few well-established storylines, under the constraint that a historian can use a particular storyline only when it has some – often minimal – support in the sources. Few practicing social and cultural historians, which I am, who seek to understand the widest portion of people who often didn’t leave written records of their own, believe they can do so without interdisciplinarity. Legal documents, especially those of courts that directly deal with common people, are critical for understanding voiceless residents of any society. My second book was on the largest urban antebellum African American community in the Western Hemisphere. I spent months poring through legal and administrative records to find and give voices to these often voiceless people – free and slave – and to understand how the law silently yet powerfully affected their lives. What I found was agency within an imbalanced legal system and amid tightening racial proscriptions.
What challenges do historians face when studying the impact of legal systems on different societies, and how do you address these challenges in your work?
By the start of the nineteenth century, the growth of propertyless classes in America caused the historians’ emphasis to shift away from the concept of progress as the growth of freeholding ownership of property and towards the concept of progress—improvement in technology, organization of production, and creation of opportunities for immigrants to rise in society. The law was at the center of this transformation. The well-known 1838 Charles River (Mass.) Bridge court case is instructive. Rather than continue a monopoly for this pay-bridge company over the river to get from Boston to Charlestown, the court favored competition and allowed rival companies to construct bridges for the sake of cost savings. This legal ruling harnessed and then furthered a democratic reordering that was then sweeping the country and changed our basic essence from an earlier model of collectivism to a more modern model of individualism.
What do you find most rewarding about teaching and mentoring students in your courses?
Simply put: Everything.
In what ways do you see your course preparing students for careers or further study in fields related to law, history, or public policy?
All of the above, I hope. The study of history is simply the study of life, and how our modern lives have come to be. We don’t live in a vacuum.
What are your favorite undergraduate courses to teach, and why are they your favorites?
All of them. I teach Colonial America as enthusiastically as I teach Lincoln, slavery, the South, and the Civil War and Reconstruction because they’re all entirely, hopelessly, passionately related.
Courses taught that fulfill requirements in the Law, History, and Society Major Concentration:
- Hist 1001: United States History I
- Hist2020: The Coming of the Civil War
- Hist 2021: The Civil War and Reconstruction
- Hist 2047: American South to 1865
- Hist2048: American South since 1865
- Hist 2053/ Hist3005: Colonial America: Competition and Authority Before the Revolution
- Hist3039: Lincoln and His World
- Hist 4044: History of the American South to 1865
- Hist 4045: History of the American South from 1865
- Hist 5120: Seminar on the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction
- Hist 5146: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War Era
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