I study the political history of the nineteenth-century United States, with particular interest in partisanship and the politics of sectionalism and slavery from the 1830s through Reconstruction. I am also the Director of The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Currently, I am working on a book about the Nullification Crisis.

My most recent book, The Business of Bigotry: John Van Evrie’s Nineteenth-Century Racist Media Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), explores the life and times of a shadowy but notorious northern proslavery propagandist. Born in Canada and educated in Rochester, NY, John H. Van Evrie built a formidable publishing company in New York City, through which he wrote, edited, and printed some of the Civil War era’s most virulent racist and proslavery texts. Perhaps most enduringly influential for popularizing the slogan “white supremacy,” Van Evrie was an aggressive publicist who repackaged academic ideas about racial hierarchy into a product that he peddled to a wide audience.

One of Van Evrie’s most powerful patrons was Jefferson Davis, who features prominently in Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In this book, I used a dual-biographical approach to study the internal conflict that plagued the antebellum Democratic Party. Through the interconnected and often bitterly opposed careers of Stephen A. Douglas and Jefferson Davis, I traced the deep roots of the party’s dramatic rupture in 1860.

Davis and Douglas quarreled over many things, but few issues divided them more sharply than the question of Kansas. My second book, Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Routledge, 2016) is an undergraduate-oriented text that combines my original narrative with edited primary documents. It surveys Kansas’s bloody Civil War-era history through the eyes of diverse combatants, from an Irish-born Missouri slaveholder to a self-emancipated freedman who died trying to liberate his wife.

The Kansas controversy stirred deep feelings among antebellum Americans. In my first book, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge University Press, 2014), I explored how emotions such as indignation and jealousy shaped regional and partisan identities, fostered pro- and antislavery political coalitions, and ultimately mobilized northerners and southerners to fight. This book received the Southern Historical Association’s James A. Rawley Award.

My research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the West Virginia Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

At the University of Tennessee, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, political history, the American presidency, and political economy. I welcome graduate applications in all these fields.

Research Interests

Early Republic and Antebellum U.S., Civil War Era, Political History, History of Emotions, Slavery and Emancipation

Selected Publications

The Business of Bigotry: John Van Evrie’s Nineteenth-Century Racist Media Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026)

“Lincoln and Douglas,” in A Companion to Abraham Lincoln, eds. Michael Green, Evan C. Rothera, and Shae Smith Cox (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2026)

“South Carolina’s Long Division: The Nullification and Secession Movements,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, new series 1 (January 2026): 30-41

“Building a Proslavery Lobby: The Domestic Politics of the Encomium Case,” Journal of the Early Republic 45 (Winter 2025): 505-535

“Slavery,” in The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World, eds. Katie Barclay and Peter N. Stearns (New York: Routledge Press, 2022): 460-472

“Charleston, City of Mourners: Anticipations of Civil War in the Cradle of Secession,” Civil War History 67 (March 2021): 7-28

Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

“The Compromise of 1850 and the Search for a Usable Past,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9 (September 2019): 438-456

“Secession and Disunion,” in The Cambridge History of the American Civil War, Volume 2, Affairs of State, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Cambridge University Press, 2019): 43-62

“‘Tell Us Something About State Rights’: Northern Republicans, State Rights, and the Coming of the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7 (June 2017): 242-268

“Tracing the ‘Sacred Relicts’: The Strange Career of Preston Brooks’s Cane,” Civil War History

63 (June 2017): 113-132

“Interdisciplinary Studies of the Civil War Era: Recent Trends and Future Prospects,” Journal of American Studies 51 (May 2017): 349-383

Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Critical Moments in American History Series) (Routledge Press, 2016)

“A Theory of Moral Outrage: Indignation and Eighteenth-Century British Abolitionism,” Slavery & Abolition 36 (December 2015): 662-683

“Mountaineers Becoming Free: Emancipation and Statehood in West Virginia,” West Virginia History New Series 9 (Fall 2015): 37-71

Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

“Politics and Changing Views of Jealousy in the Antebellum United States,” in Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, eds. Ann Brooks and David Lemmings (Routledge Press, 2014): 156-172

“What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature,” Journal of American History 99 (September 2012): 415-439

“‘The Indignation of Freedom-Loving People’: The Caning of Charles Sumner and Emotion in Antebellum Politics,” Journal of Social History 44 (Spring 2011): 689-705