The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation
abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which …

National and cultural origin stories pervade much of Thomas Wentworth Higginson's work,
especially in the immediate post-Civil War years. Shortly after leaving his position as leader …

There is a revival of interest in Civil War Literature. In addition to numerous monographs and
articles there are new anthologies, collections of essays, and an MLA teaching volume …

Where is Thomas Wentworth Higginson? An immensely prolific writer and abolitionist, he
was born in 1823, just thirty-five years after the US Constitution was ratified, and lived until …

Abstract Averaging Americans: Literature, Statistics, and Inequality was sparked by a
computational discovery I made in a corpus of more than 18,000 works of US fiction …

Reconstructing Sexuality argues for the importance of sexuality in the politics of the Civil War
era and for the importance of the Civil War in the nineteenth-century evolution of sexuality …

Imitating Matter examines the work of four nineteenth-century American figures for whom the
science of matter served as a crucial interlocutor on questions of social and historical …