Overview
I am a U.S. historian who is broadly interested in the co-development of capitalism and the nation-state in the 1800s. My articles have appeared in the Journal of American History and other scholarly publications and I am now finishing up a book, Grassroots Leviathan: Northern Agricultural Reform in the Slaveholding Republic, for Johns Hopkins University Press. At the Society, I’ll be working on understanding the energy transition in nineteenth-century America.
Research Focus
“King Hay” and the Energy Transition in the Nineteenth-Century United States
“King Hay” investigates the surprising fact that northern hay was of comparable monetary value to southern cotton during the nineteenth century. This is surprising because of the well-known connection between “King Cotton” and the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. My study aims to contribute in several areas at once, beginning with the burgeoning field of energy history. Because literal horsepower was indispensable in the era, dried grass occupied a strategic juncture in the era’s energy system and consequently underpinned all economic activity. This gave the epochal transition from organic to mineral energy sources a distinctive character—more halting and hybrid than often imagined—that is well worth attending to in an era when we must manage our own, different energy transition. “King Hay” also expands on my forthcoming first book’s reinterpretation of the so-called “economic causes” of the Civil War by looking closely at northern agriculture. Haymaking exemplified a matrix of changes—ideological, institutional, economic and environmental—that led northern farmers into political alliance with nascent manufacturers in the decades before the war. Finally, “King Hay” contributes to our understanding of statistical knowledge and its uses. Because hay was rarely exported, it was harder to measure than global commodities, such as cotton, that passed through customs houses. The pre-twentieth-century statistical archive is therefore biased toward global trade and tends to distort our understanding of where and how economic development occurred. That domestic hay output became measurable at a specific moment casts light on the key policies that officials consciously undertook first to perceive, and then to develop, a distinctly American national economy. In sum, “King Hay” aims at a novel, nuanced, and historically grounded account of the defining transformations of the nineteenth-century United States.