Rachel A. Shelden’s book, The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History will be released Tuesday, October 27, 2026, by the University of North Carolina Press (W. Hodding Carter III Books Series).
For the first century of the nation’s history, the Court was unmistakably a political institution, both by design and in practice. Justices were fully expected to engage in partisan politics—there was no concern that such engagement would lead to corruption or undue bias—and they remained deeply involved in civic debate and the electoral process while on the bench. In addition to hearing cases in the capital, each justice spent much of his time “riding circuit” and presiding over federal trial courts. On circuit and in Washington, nineteenth-century justices wrote for partisan newspapers, drafted legislation, advised partisan allies, campaigned for colleagues, and even ran for political offices from the bench. Through these political interactions, members of the Court helped shape debates about the Constitution’s meaning at a time when most Americans did not believe in judicial supremacy. In this sweeping history, Shelden brings readers inside the social and political world of the justices, recovering their essential role in the nineteenth century’s turbulent politics. She also charts shifts at the turn of the twentieth century, when members of the Court and the legal community refashioned the judiciary as an apolitical institution, setting the stage for an increasingly more powerful—and more isolated—modern Court.
The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History is available for preorder now!
Mary E. Mendoza’s monograph, Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border, was published by the University of North Carolina Press on April 28! When most people picture the US-Mexico border, they think of walls, fences, concrete, and wire. But in this first history of how the environment influenced physical boundary-making between the two nations, Mendoza focuses on how the natural world shaped ideas about race, gender, and security. In so doing, she unearths surprising origins of the modern-day immigration debate.
Join us on October 15–17 for the 2026 Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture Series featuring Fay Yarbrough, senior associate dean of faculty and graduate programs, William Gaines Twyman Professor of History, Rice University. Yarbrough’s lectures are titled, “Sovereignty and Strife: The Civil War Era in Indian Territory.”
Professor Yarbrough’s research interests focus on the Native populations of the southeastern United States and Indian Territory during the nineteenth century. She is particularly interested in the interactions between Indigenous peoples and people of African descent.
Her first book, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century, explores the complex relationship between the construction of sexual boundaries and the formation of tribal and racial identities. Professor Yarbrough also co-edited a collection of essays entitled Gender and Sexuality in the Indigenous Americas, 1400–1850 with Sandra Slater (College of Charleston).
Professor Yarbrough’s most recent book is Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country, which considers the participation of Choctaw Indians in the American Civil War.
Congratulations to Joshua Strayhorn who has accepted a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota!
During his Richards Center fellowship, Joshua presented his book project, “Freedom’s Promise: Black Mobility, Migration, and Freedom Dreams in Eastern North Carolina, 1862-1898,” at a manuscript workshop with invited scholars Tera W. Hunter, Princeton University and Dylan C. Penningroth, The University of California, Berkeley, and the Richards Center community.
Strayhorn described the importance of fellowship in supporting his growth as a scholar:
“My year at the Richards Center and at Penn State more broadly has been integral to my development as a scholar and has allowed me to make great progress in my research project. Without the time and research support offered by the Richards Center, I would not have been able to enter the first year of my tenure track position with as much momentum as I have now. I will always cherish the intellectual community that was formed here and the generous and generative ideas that developed in the workshop. Bouncing ideas off my colleagues pushed me to think about things in ways I never would have. I will be forever grateful for the time spent at the Richards Center.”
Good luck Dr. Strayhorn on your future endeavors!
Congratulations to Heather Carlquist Walser (Ph.D. 2024) who has accepted a tenure track job as Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and the Kinder Institute of Constitutional Democracy (KCID) at the University of Missouri starting in August 2026!!
Congratulations to Halee Robinson who has accepted a tenure track job as Assistant Professor of History and Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio! 🎉🎉
During her Richards Center fellowship, Halee presented her book project, “They Taken Him Away: Race, Punishment, and the Intimate Histories of the Texas Prison System, 1865-1912,” at a manuscript workshop with invited scholars, Brandi Brimmer, Morehead-Cain Alumni Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Martha Escobar, Associate Professor at California State University, Northridge, and the Richards Center community.
Reflecting on her experience during the fellowship, Robinson said: “My time at Penn State has been intellectually rich and rewarding because of the Richards Center. During my postdoc, I have had opportunities to attend workshops and professional development sessions, engage with senior scholars, connect with other brilliant fellows, and workshop my book manuscript. The latter was particularly fruitful because I received such helpful feedback and guidance from affiliates of the Richards Center and outside scholars. Above all, my time at Penn State has allowed me to write and revise my manuscript, which has been invaluable before starting a tenure-track position in the fall. I have enjoyed every moment of my time at the Richards Center, and I am grateful for the time and space to develop my ideas in this supportive intellectual community.”
Good luck Dr. Robinson on all your future endeavors!
Congratulations to Hannah Katherine Hicks who has accepted a tenure track position at the University of Miami as Assistant Professor of History!! 🎉🎉
During Hannah’s fellowship, she has participated in numerous workshops for the Richards Center community including workshopping her application letter and CV, a university press book proposal, and mock zoom interviews.
Last spring the Richards Center held Hannah’s manuscript workshop with invited scholars Kathleen Brown from the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Hadden from Western Michigan University and workshopped her project, “In Her Defense: Black and White Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War South.”
Hicks described her fellowship as transformative: “I so enjoyed and appreciated my two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Richards Center, which have been really life-changing! The Richards Center community of professors, postdocs, predocs, and graduate students are second-to-none in their support for one another’s work, their kindness, and their ability to offer incisive, helpful feedback. Having a manuscript workshop last year, benefiting from other opportunities to share my works-in-progress, and sage advice from Richards Center affiliated professors all helped me to revise my dissertation into a manuscript, find a tenure-track job, and finally move forward with publishing my book. Though I will miss being at the Richards Center, I am excited to be starting a new position at the University of Miami in August.”
Congratulations and good luck Hannah in all your future endeavors!
As the academic year has come to a close, the Richards Center proudly congratulates our 2025-26 postdoctoral fellows as they begin exciting new chapters in their careers this fall! During their time at Penn State, they contributed significantly to the community through their research, collaboration, and mentorship.
Halee Robinson will join the University of Texas at San Antonio as Assistant Professor of History and Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Reflecting on her experience during the fellowship, Robinson said:
“My time at Penn State has been intellectually rich and rewarding because of the Richards Center. During my postdoc, I have had opportunities to attend workshops and professional development sessions, engage with senior scholars, connect with other brilliant fellows, and workshop my book manuscript. The latter was particularly fruitful because I received such helpful feedback and guidance from affiliates of the Richards Center and outside scholars. Above all, my time at Penn State has allowed me to write and revise my manuscript, which has been invaluable before starting a tenure-track position in the fall. I have enjoyed every moment of my time at the Richards Center, and I am grateful for the time and space to develop my ideas in this supportive intellectual community.”
Joshua Strayhorn will begin his new role as Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota. Strayhorn described the importance of the fellowship in supporting his growth as a scholar:
“My year at the Richards Center and at Penn State more broadly has been integral to my development as a scholar and has allowed me to make great progress in my research project. Without the time and research support offered by the Richards Center, I would not have been able to enter the first year of my tenure track position with as much momentum as I have now. I will always cherish the intellectual community that was formed here and the generous and generative ideas that developed in the workshop. Bouncing ideas off my colleagues pushed me to think about things in ways I never would have. I will be forever grateful for the time spent at the Richards Center.”
After two years as a postdoctoral fellow, Hannah Katherine Hicks will join the University of Miami as Assistant Professor of History. Hicks described her fellowship as transformative:
“I so enjoyed and appreciated my two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Richards Center, which have been really life-changing! The Richards Center community of professors, postdocs, predocs, and graduate students are second-to-none in their support for one another’s work, their kindness, and their ability to offer incisive, helpful feedback. Having a manuscript workshop last year, benefiting from other opportunities to share my works-in-progress, and sage advice from Richards Center affiliated professors all helped me to revise my dissertation into a manuscript, find a tenure-track job, and finally move forward with publishing my book. Though I will miss being at the Richards Center, I am excited to be starting a new position at the University of Miami in August.”
We say thank you to and wish the best for Halee, Joshua, and Hannah! We look forward to following their continued success in the years ahead!
Hope McCaffrey: We are so excited to have Professor Jonathan Jones joining us today to talk about his book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis, published in 2025 by the University of North Carolina Press. The book was shortlisted for the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln prize. Dr Jones is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University, and he was an inaugural postdoctoral scholar in Civil War history at the Richards Center from 2020 to 2021. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Jones
Jonathan S. Jones: Thanks for having me.
HM: We were wondering if you could start by talking about the origins of the project and what drew you to this subject.
JSJ: Absolutely. I’ve always been interested in the Civil War, particularly in what happens after the Civil War, kind of the post-Civil War period. And so I knew, from the deep origins of my career as a scholar, I knew I wanted to work on Civil War veterans. But the project that became my book, Opium Slavery, originally was my dissertation project, and it actually came about by accident. When I was working on a not totally unrelated project, about Civil War veterans but not on the topic of drugs and substance use, I kept finding in the primary sources these offhand references to things like “morphism” and the “morphine habit,” and I couldn’t get those out of my head.
So, I stepped away from that original project, and I spent a few years away from graduate school. When it came time to come back and pick a dissertation topic, those sources were still lodged in my brain, and I could not get them out of there. Meanwhile, the opioid crisis, the ongoing opioid epidemic that in our time, dates back to the 1990’s, really started to heat up in terms of media coverage. And so, putting the two together, I realized that a lot of what I was seeing on TV and hearing on the radio was strikingly, eerily similar to what I was seeing in the primary sources coming out of the 1860s and 70s and 80s. And so that’s what motivated me to really dive into this project. And from there, it spiraled out of control.
Erica Croft: Can you tell us a little bit more about the story you wanted to tell?
JSJ: Yeah, I wanted to tell two sort of narratives, right? And I wanted to blend them as seamlessly as possible. I wanted to tell a story about opium, the substance of opium from which opiates and opioids are originally derived. And so I knew that that was going to involve doing things like figuring out where opium came from in terms of the nineteenth-century U.S., how medical doctors prescribed opium, what they knew about the concept of addiction, and how those things evolved across the long civil war era. I also wanted to reconstruct addiction as an epidemic, right? So, I wanted to tell this big picture story of what I came to recognize as America’s earliest or first opioid crisis. But I didn’t want the people to get lost in that broader framework.
And so, I wanted to tell that big story, the history of the epidemic, but I also wanted to narrate the individual stories of civil war veterans. What I settled on was a methodology where I situated the story in a one-hundred-year window dating from the 1820s through the 1920s, and I did a lot of research into how people thought about substances, how people prescribed and also dealt with, opiates. But I decided to tell a human-centered story. I focused really closely on a data set. That’s a really unhuman way to describe them, but a sample of 200 Civil War veterans that I found over the years of doing the research. And so, I tell this broader story through the eyes of these individuals as much as I can. So I guess to put it all back into words, it’s a big story, it’s the epidemiological history, but it’s also, I hope, a human story too, so that the individual people whose lives are so affected by addiction in the 1800s don’t fall by the wayside in telling the bigger story.
HM: Thank you so much. So, on the topic of research and turning research into a story, we were wondering if you could talk a little bit about how your time at the Richards Center contributed to or ended up shaping the project.
JSJ: Yeah, my time at the Richard center honestly meant everything to me. I never imagined a scenario where in my career I would have an opportunity to do something like the Richards Center postdoc that I did in 2020 and 2021—to just dedicate myself to doing additional research and to refining a project. And so that chunk of time at the Richards Center came at a really crucial moment for me. I was about to step into, luckily, an academic position, but a rather teaching intensive position, and I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time over the subsequent couple years to work on my writing, and so I dived into the postdoc at the Richards Center, knowing that at the end of it, I wanted to have an early version of the book manuscript. I needed to go from dissertation to book, or at least a draft of the book, in the course of a year.
And so, having the chance to step away from teaching, to step mostly away from service, except for scholarly organizations and things like that, and really immerse myself in the research that I had already started doing, but also the chance to workshop pieces of the manuscript at the Richards Center, to interact with the faculty and staff and students at the Richards Center, and also outside scholars that generously donated their time to read really closely the early version of my manuscript, couldn’t have come at a better time. I think without the year at the Richards Center, I wouldn’t have been able to finish the book as quickly as I did.
But more importantly, I don’t think it would have been at the same scale that I was able to write. I think it would have been a much smaller, more narrowly focused story. In particular, when I came to the Richards Center, I thought of myself as a scholar of Civil War veterans, and I was thinking mostly along the lines of like manhood and gender and questions like that. But at the Richards Center, I was challenged to think more in terms of other questions, like race, for example. And so being able to workshop the material that I had found and see it through a new set of eyes and be asked new questions about it, I think made the story much more rich, and really did change my research findings as well.
EC: I’m really curious, in that research process, if there is anything particularly surprising or interesting that you found, a specific source or a particular insight?
JSJ: Definitely. Yeah, wow. Where to begin? I guess the thing that most immediately comes to mind is when I was working on this project as a dissertation, I was not so much focused on specifically the question of Chinese immigrants and opium smoking. My frame of reference for this is going to get a little bit deep in the weeds here, apologies, but my frame of reference was Civil War veterans. They were mostly white, mostly born in the United States. Of course, about ten percent of the Union army is Black. But in my sources, I found that the topic of Black soldiers and opioid use was really under covered by the sources. In the earlier phase of my research, I was mostly focused on a particular set of white male Civil War veterans, and I had detached the story that I was thinking about and telling from the broader Gilded Age context after the Civil War, where you have these really heated debates over immigration and race, and, of course, the racial upheaval coming out of Reconstruction.
And so, I believe it might have been Cathleen Cahill, who first prodded me, and encouraged me to think about Chinese opium smoking on the West Coast in relation to Civil War veterans further east in the north and the south in the 1870s and the 1880s. I dived into a set of primary sources, these legislative debates in California about drug use and immigration, things that I would have never even thought to question and to try to relate back to the story that I told. And what I ended up finding is that the “problem,” right, the perceived problem of opioid use, those Civil War veterans and other native-born, particularly white Americans, were the overwhelming majority of opioid users. They did not surface as much in the kind of public debates about opioid use as Chinese opium smokers did, even though they had very different ways of consuming. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds, but there are almost two parallel ways of consuming the drug. But yet, Chinese immigrants got scapegoated, and that affected the way that people talked about Civil War veterans as well. None of that would be in the book without having been asked those questions during some of the workshops that I did at the Richards Center. And so those kinds of sources were super, super powerful.
HM: It’s fantastic to hear you talk about how the exciting things you found were maybe due to the time at the Richards Center, as well! That’s great. So, because the Richards Center is a center for the study of the Civil War era, we’d love to hear what your thoughts are on how your book changes the way we think about or consider the Civil War era broadly?
JSJ: Yeah, I appreciate this question. I’ve had to give this a lot of thought lately. One of the things that comes front of mind to me is that I think still, it’s the case, that a lot of times when we think about the Civil War, as traumatic as it was, as bloody as it was, I mean, America’s bloodiest conflict, more people died during the civil war than all of America’s other wars kind of combined. Even still, I think we tend to sanitize the conflict. I think that we tend to have a narrative around the conflict, with things like reenacting and movies, makes it seem, to a certain extent, like it was fun and games. And I also tend to think that when we, in an academic sense, focus on the Civil War, we’re a lot of the time inadvertently telling what scholars call a freedom narrative—a narrative that focuses on the abolition of slavery, and rightly so. But I think in these twin ways of thinking about the Civil War, a lot of the drama and the bloodshed can be sanitized.
And so, the first thing that I wanted to do with this book, besides uncover this history that had been largely forgotten and had never really been taken seriously, I wanted to bring back. I wanted to take a hard look at kind of the traumatic aftershocks of the Civil War in a way that I thought would bring a more realistic reconstruction of the conflict. Yes, we should, of course, talk about abolition. Yes, we should talk about all the other kind of changes, you know, politically, that come out of the Civil War, right? But also, at the same time, it’s really difficult to celebrate a war that was so catastrophic. I wanted to remind people of that broader point.
Certainly, I’m not the only scholar to make that point. Over the last ten or fifteen years, a number of scholars have written books that critics sort of laugh off as the dark side of the Civil War. But I think it’s really important to think about the cost of all the changes that are brought about by the Civil War in order to understand the conflict with a more wholesome accounting of the costs.
The other thing that I wanted to do was to take the medical history of the Civil War very seriously. A lot of the time when we think about books about the Civil War era, medicine maybe gets a few lines or maybe a chapter. But the most universal experience of the Civil War was getting sick and suffering, right? And so, I think for me, the Civil War is medical history. I wanted to tell a story about the Civil War and the aftershocks of the Civil War, but have medicine surfaced to the front of that. In doing so, what I point out, what the research shows, is that the Civil War really changed American medicine in ways that are pretty unexpected. Some of the earliest iterations of drug addiction therapy, for example, in the U.S., we can trace those right back to the late 1860s when Civil War veterans were returning home addicted to drugs like opium and morphine. And that’s just scratching the surface. So, to sum it up, I wanted to reconstruct a more realistic, more harrowing, version of the Civil War, and I wanted to do so through the lens of medical history. And so, I hope those are the kinds of contributions that the book will make.
HM: Thank you so much. We, again, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.
JSJ: Thank you for having me.
Richards Center assistant program director, Hope McCaffrey, and graduate research assistant Erica Croft recently interviewed Jonathan Jones, Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University, about his new book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis, published in 2025 by the University of North Carolina Press. The book was shortlisted for the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln prize. Jones was the inaugural postdoctoral scholar in Civil War history at the Richards Center from 2020 to 2021.
Jones explained that his fellowship at the Richards Center came at a crucial moment in his career: “I was about to step into, luckily, an academic position, but a rather teaching intensive position, and I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time over the subsequent couple years to work on my writing.” He dove into the postdoc, knowing that at the end of it, he hoped to have a book manuscript. “I needed to go from dissertation to book, or at least a draft of the book, in the course of a year.”
The Richards Center gave Jones the time to immerse himself in his completed research, the chance to workshop his writing, and the opportunity “to interact with the faculty and staff and students at the Richards Center, and also outside scholars that generously donated their time to read really closely the early version of my manuscript.” Without the year at the Richards Center, he said, he would not have “been able to finish the book as quickly as I did.”
At the Richards Center, Jones felt that he “was challenged to think more in terms of other questions.” Seeing his research “through a new set of eyes and be asked new questions about it, … made the story much more rich.”
Read the complete interview with Jonathan Jones on the Richards Center’s website.
The Richards Center hosted two manuscript workshops in the past few months for the current postdoctoral scholars. These workshops are a central component of the Richards Center’s postdoctoral program, designed to support postdocs as they prepare their manuscripts for publication with an academic press. The Center invites leading scholars in the field to read the full manuscripts and offer substantive feedback. In addition to strengthening the manuscripts themselves, these workshops provide postdocs with valuable opportunities to expand their professional networks. Each postdoc also invites interested members of the Penn State community to participate in the discussion.
These workshops have helped scholars in their early careers launch successful book projects. Most recently, former postdoctoral scholar Jonathan Jones published the book he workshopped during his time at the Richards Center.
For the first workshop, held in December of 2025, postdoctoral scholar Joshua Strayhorn presented his in-progress manuscript, “Freedom’s Promise: Black Mobility, Migration, and Freedom Dreams in Eastern North Carolina, 1862-1898.” Invited senior scholars Professor Tera Hunter, Princeton University, and Professor Dylan Penningroth, The University of California, Berkeley, joined the Richards Center community to review and offer comment on Joshua’s book manuscript. Participants enjoyed a community lunch following the workshop to celebrate Joshua’s book project and the end of the 2025 year.
The second manuscript workshop was held in early March for postdoctoral scholar Halee Robinson, who presented her book manuscript entitled, “They Taken Him Away: Race, Punishment, and the Intimate Histories of the Texas Prison System, 1865–1912.” Professor Brandi Brimmer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Professor Martha Escobar, California State University – Northridge, were the senior scholars invited to join the Richards Center community to review and offer comment on Halee’s manuscript. This generative workshop was a fantastic way for the community to come together before heading out for spring break!
Faculty News
Cathleen D. Cahill recently hosted Hilary N. Green on The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast to discuss Green’s most recent book, Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War, which was published by Fordham University Press in 2025.
Martha Few and Lucien Holness have both been accepted into Under the Big Sky: The Montana Writers Retreat in Bozeman, Montana this June. This retreat provides authors with a unique opportunity to focus on their writing, share their ideas with fellow writers, and immerse themselves in their creative work. Set on B Bar Ranch, a working cattle ranch in Paradise Valley sharing a six-mile border with Yellowstone National Park, this retreat will offer writers space to think deeply, work intentionally, gain insight from colleagues and facilitators, and move their writing project forward.
Gabrielle Foreman has been selected as a Humanities Institute Resident Scholar for spring 2027. Foreman will devote the spring to her new book project, Founding Families: The Colored Convention Movement and the Long Fight for Equal Rights.
Christopher Heaney was awarded a $25,000 Engaged Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation! The grant will support Proyecto Huayo, a community-guided collaboration with San Mateo de Huánchor, Peru, focused on the recontextualization of a pre-Hispanic ritual cranial mask now held in the Smithsonian. The project combines archival research, community education, archaeology led by Peruvian partners, and structured dialogue between communities and museums, with an emphasis on ethical research and local priorities.
Lucien Holness has been selected as a Humanities Institute Resident Scholar for spring 2027. Holness will be revising his book manuscript, The Making of a Free State: Free Soil, Free Labor, and Black Freedom in the Borderland of Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Mary E. Mendoza recently presented on a panel, “Is There A Border Crisis?” at The Albert LePage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University.
Greg Peek was awarded $3,500 from the Clinton County Community Foundation for a grant he submitted on behalf of the Piper Aviation Museum in Lock Haven, PA. The funds are designed to be used to upgrade overhead and display lighting fixtures in the museum’s second floor gallery. Peek also was awarded a teaching Faculty Development from from CLASS Teaching Faculty Advisory Committee.
Former Postdoctoral News
Jessica Wicks-Allen, former postdoctoral fellow, recent interviewed on The Journal of the American History podcast to discuss her new journal article “Child Apprenticeship and Black Maternal Authority following the Civil War.”
Former Predoctoral News
Adam McNeil has accepted a tenure track position in the Department of African Studies, University of Notre Dame.
Graduate Student News
Morgan Haller presented her research at the Newberry Consortium on American Indian Studies (NCAIS) graduate student conference at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her talk was titled “The “Brave-Hearted Women”: Intersectional Political Activism through the Feminine Narrative in Akwesasne Notes.”
Morgan Haller
Annelise Walker received a 2026–27 short-term research fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library! They will be using it to consult Aymara-language materials and documents about colonial mining for their dissertation “Collecting the Subterranean: Mining and Minerals between Alto Perú and Spain, 1749–1809.”
Norman Watson has been awarded a postdoctoral teaching fellowship from the History Department at Penn State.
Former Graduate Student News
William Cossen’s (Ph.D. 2016) book, Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has been awarded the American Catholic Historical Association’s inaugural Christopher J. Kauffman Prize in U.S. Catholic History for “the best monograph published from 2022 to 2024 that provides new and/or challenging insight to the study of U.S. Catholic history.”
Faculty Publications
Martha Few’s chapter, “Gender, Colonialism, and Disability in the Aftermath of Natural Disasters: Medicalized Trauma and the 1773 Guatemala Earthquake,” just appeared in in Heather Vrana and David Carey, Jr.’s Histories of Disability in Latin America.
Sherita Johnson was recently interviewed for a Penn State story on her co-authored new book, Mixing: Race, Higher Education, and the Case of Clyde Kennard, published by the University Press of Mississippi.
Jacob Lee’s chapter, “Alliances,” was published in The Cambridge History of the American Revolution, Volume II, Revolution, edited by Marjoleine Kars, Michael A. McDonnell, and Andrew M. Schocket.
Mary E. Mendoza had her first book, Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico, published by the University of North Carolina Press this spring.
Christina Snyder published an article in The Economist as part of their America at 250 series, “The Indian Removal Act: Unchecked Expansionism and Disregard for the Rule of Law”
Snyder also co-guest edited Native South, special issue, Choctaw National Records, featuring a project on Choctaw court records. Snyder and Edward Green contributed to the journal the article, “Angry in the House”: The Criminalization of Whooping in the Choctaw Nation.
Edward Green, Penn State Department of History Postdoctoral Fellow, also contributed, “Learn Your Laws and It Will Save You Many a Dollar”: Towards a Social History of the Choctaw Court System, to the journal special issue.
Former Graduate Student Publication
William Cossen (Ph.D. 2016) signed a contract with LSU Press for his second book, Soldiers and Sacraments: The Lived Catholic Civil War.