Racial theories and human remains circulated between Cuban intellectuals and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, where the physical anthropologist Samuel Morton assembled his collec...

Union General John C. Frémont excited considerable controversy during the Civil War, and not just due to his dubious military competence and early advocacy of emancipation. Many republican‐influenc...

This article examines Pennsylvania's 1840s debt crisis within the broader context of antebellum U.S. political economy and transatlantic finance. When Pennsylvania defaulted on millions in state bo...

This roundtable is an outgrowth of a panel held at the BrANCH annual conference in Cardiff in September 2025. While the BrANCH panel focused on the particulars of the research findings of the panel...

Volume 27, Issue 1 of American Nineteenth Century History

This roundtable is an outgrowth of a panel held at the BrANCH annual conference in Cardiff in September 2025. While the BrANCH panel focused on the particulars of the research findings of the panel...

Volume 27, Issue 1 of American Nineteenth Century History

A scholarly consensus has emerged in recent years that the Declaration of Independence was the “apple of gold” in Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery political thought and moral grounding. Prior to Cong...

Browse the latest articles and research from American Nineteenth Century History

The history of the contemporary prison and its underlying “liberal mythology” was constructed not only in American reformatories, workhouses, and convict camps, but also in the debate halls of the ...

The history of the contemporary prison and its underlying “liberal mythology” was constructed not only in American reformatories, workhouses, and convict camps, but also in the debate halls of the ...

This article outlines the political agendas surrounding the dedication of the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Statue, an early Confederate monument commissioned in Britain in 1863 and unveiled with much...

This essay considers the changes in Thomas Jefferson's scholarly reputation since the bicentennial of 1976, with particular focus on the impact of revelations about Sally Hemings and Jefferson's mi...

This article examines black thought and black ideas about racial consciousness after Reconstruction in order to rethink the way African American leaders conceived the relationship between work and ...

This article examines black thought and black ideas about racial consciousness after Reconstruction in order to rethink the way African American leaders conceived the relationship between work and ...

Published in American Nineteenth Century History (Ahead of Print, 2026)

Between 1861 and 1865, hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers received traumatic injuries in service to their country and suddenly found themselves classified as casualties. They witnessed firstha...

This article analyzes the cultural trajectory of a small, but influential denomination that formed in 1843. Wesleyan Methodism first emerged as an abolitionist protest against the Methodist comprom...

In June 1849, James K. Polk died from cholera in Nashville, less than four months removed from the presidency. Seizing on a sensational column in the New York Herald, the editor of the Tennessee Ba...

Volume 26, Issue 3 of American Nineteenth Century History

The California Gold Rush of the mid‐nineteenth century attracted a multitude of prospectors from around the world, bringing together a vibrant mix of ethnicities and cultures. Historians have argue...

Browse the latest articles and research from American Nineteenth Century History

This article examines the extent to which enslavers across the antebellum South forced enslaved men and women to reproduce. Using a spectrum of violence as a tool of coercion, enslavers coerced, ca...

This article examines the extent to which enslavers across the antebellum South forced enslaved men and women to reproduce. Using a spectrum of violence as a tool of coercion, enslavers coerced, ca...

Published in American Nineteenth Century History (Vol. 26, No. 2, 2025)

Young people away from home in a world replete with temptation: to many Northerners, this was a disturbing fact of life in the nineteenth century's middle decades. How could a young person operate ...

Young people away from home in a world replete with temptation: to many Northerners, this was a disturbing fact of life in the nineteenth century's middle decades. How could a young person operate ...

During the 1850s, southern defenders of slavery used the concepts of Malthusian-Ricardian political economy to contest class relations, territorial policy, and the reopening of the international sl...

Volume 26, Issue 2 of American Nineteenth Century History

Browse the latest articles and research from American Nineteenth Century History

In 1862, the Episcopal bishop of Maryland, William Whittingham, issued a prayer of thanksgiving for deliverance from the Confederate blockade to be used expressly by parishes in Washington, D.C. Th...

This article examines violent confrontations between enslaved women and white overseeing men, exploring how enslaved women opposed overseers through the weaponization of objects and fixtures on sit...

The image of the “scourged back” remains one of the most visually arresting depictions of slavery. Based on a photograph taken in Baton Rouge in April 1863 and later published in Harper's Weekly, i...

Universities and Slavery. Volume 26, Issue 1 of American Nineteenth Century History

Universities and Slavery. Volume 26, Issue 1 of American Nineteenth Century History

The article asks why Gettysburg has always been the granted an exceptional place in the memory of the Civil War. It argues that Gettysburg, more perfectly than any other battle, has suited narrativ...

This article centers on the different ways that English and American universities have uncovered, publicized, and responded to their historical connections to transatlantic slavery. It argues that ...