Brief Background

Who am I and where do I come from?

I am a 20th-century United States historian particularly interested in social and cultural issues in our past. This means that I explore a range of issues in the American past -- political, economic, and social -- but that I am particularly interested in pursuing the social implications of change: how developments in American history affected different people (different in class, gender, race, ethnicity) differently.  From 2007-2010, I hold the Robert Ryan Professorship of the Humanities, a rotating three year honor given by the IC School of Humanities and Sciences.

In addition to surveys and a two-semester upper-level sequence in American 20th-century history, I offer a range of courses in American social and cultural history -- ethnicity, working-class, popular culture, and crime.

My book -- The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South --  is a study of sensationalism in Southern culture from the antebellum period into the twentieth century. I study this subject by investigating a series of sensational murder cases in Richmond, Virginia, and how their coverage changed dramatically over time.  In images, in capital punishment, and in the narratives created to explain the violence in the community, these sensationalized cases changed dramatically over time.  The sensationalism in the white community was also quite distinct from that in the black community -- another side of the subject I pursue in the book.  Click on the title if you are interested in seeing more from the book.

I am currently researching the history of public execution in the South.  I am almost done with an article on the issue of race in the transition from public to private execution in the era of lynching.  Thereafter, I will be pursuing a book length manuscript on the history of capital punishment in the South.

Another project of smaller scale that I hope to turn to soon is to take the diary of an African-American teenager in 1910-12 and create annotations to make his brief entries into a window on the experience of Jim Crow Segregation. I hope to use this in my own teaching, and to publish it in a form that will make it accessible to other history teachers. 

I received my Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999. Go Heels!

My area of study at UNC was United States social and cultural history from 1850 to the present. Both my dissertation and Master's thesis (a study of cultural life at the turn of the 20th century, focusing upon the advent of the movies and amusement parks) centered around the social and cultural history of my home town, Richmond, Virginia.

I began my college career at Hampshire College and finished it -- after several twists and turns including an apprenticeship as a book binder -- at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I majored in History and minored in English.

For more: Curriculum Vitae