John Craig Hammond is Professor of History at Penn State New Kensington and will join the faculty at University Park in Fall 2027. His research focuses on empire, enslavement, and emancipation in North America between 1750 and 1860, and on the politics of slavery in the United States between 1770 and 1830. His most recent book, The Centrality of Slavery: Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines how French and American colonizers used the powers of various imperial regimes to create slave societies in present-day Missouri and Illinois from the 1720s through the 1820s. It traces how successive French, Spanish, British, and U.S regimes shaped the development of slavery over the course of a century, examines the significance of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery in the larger history of North American empires, and then analyzes the diverging histories of slavery in Illinois and Missouri from the early 1800s through the Missouri Crisis.
His first book, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (University of Virginia Press, 2007) examined how the demands of western colonizers, the potential of western disunion, and local, popular politics determined the fate of slavery in western territories such as Ohio, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri between 1790 and 1820. Hammond has also co-edited three volumes. Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (University of Virginia Press, 2011) with Matthew Mason, and A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 1, Western Slavery, National Impasse, and A Firebell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 2, The Missouri Question and Its Answers (University of Missouri Press, 2021), with Jeffrey Pasley. He has authored numerous chapters in edited volumes and articles in journals such as the Journal of the Early Republic, Journal of the Civil War Era (translated and published in Japanese in the Fukuoka University Humanities Review), American Nineteenth Century History, and the Journal of American History, and has published articles with undergraduate and graduate students at Penn State.
He is currently at work on a new monograph, tentatively entitled “The Great Missouri Question: Empire, Enslavement, and Emancipation, 1815 – 1825.” This monograph situates the Missouri Crisis in a period of intense anti-slavery and pro-slavery activity between 1815 and 1825. The monograph will also examine how the Missouri Crisis shaped and was shaped by larger conflicts over empire, enslavement, and emancipation on the North American continent, while paying special attention to the actions of enslaved people.
Dr. Hammond was born and raised in Bucks County, and is proud to serve the Commonwealth as a professor of history at Pennsylvania’s Land Grant University. His wife (Eberly College of Science, 1996) and daughter (College of Liberal Arts, Paterno Fellow, 2026) are both Penn State graduates.
Recent Publications
The Centrality of Slavery: Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.
[Honorable Mention, Jon Gjerde Prize, Best Book on Midwestern History, Midwestern History Association, 2025]
Co-editor (with Jeffrey L. Pasley) A Firebell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 2, The Missouri Question and Its Answers, University of Missouri Press, 2021.
Co-Editor (with Jeffrey L. Pasley) A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 1, Western Slavery, National Impasse, University of Missouri Press, 2021.
“From the Stacks: Research Center – Columbia, Records of Indigenous Enslavement in the Ste. Genevieve Archives,” with Emily Peebles (Penn State graduate student in French), Missouri Historical Review, 118 (January 2024), 148 – 154.
“Inveterate Imperialists: Contested Imperialisms, North American History, and the Coming of the U.S. Civil War,” American Nineteenth Century History 22 no. 2 (2021), 1 – 24
[Revised version reprinted in A Continent in Crisis: The U.S. Civil War in North America, eds., Brian Schoen, Jewel L. Spangler, and Frank Towers, (Fordham University Press, 2022), 36 – 64].
“‘Useful to the Public Business’: Mathurin-Michel Amoureux’s 1803 Letter from New Madrid,” with Thomas J. Slancauskas (Penn State undergraduate student), Missouri Historical Review 115 no. 4 (July 2021), 296 – 319.
“Mastery over Slaves, Sovereignty over Slavery: James Monroe, Virginia, and the Missouri Crisis,” in Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founders on America’s Future, eds., Peter Onuf and Robert M.S. McDonald, (University of Virginia Press, 2021), 194 – 222.
“President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Politics of Slavery,” Journal of American History, 105 (March 2019), 843 – 867.
“Mid-Continent Borderlands: Illinois and the Early American Republic, 1774 – 1854,”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Special Issue, “Illinois History—A Bicentennial Appraisal,” 111 (Spring/Summer 2018), 31 – 54.
[Special issue marking the Bicentennial of Illinois statehood, Awarded Dorothy Schwieder Prize for the best article in Midwestern History, Midwestern Historical Society, 2018]