Slavery and Freedom in the Era of Revolution: Black Radicalism

OI Virtual Conversation with Manisha Sinha (University of Connecticut) and Michael McDonnell (University of Sydney)

Michael McDonnell (University of Sydney) specializes in the era of revolution in the Atlantic world.

He is the author of Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (Hill and Wang) and The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Omohundro Institute with partner UNC Press). He also is an editor or co-editor of three other works on the Age of Revolution, including Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War (UMass Press). Deemed “required reading for students of the American Revolution” by The Historian, The Politics of War examines the political and social struggles of a revolutionary society at war with itself as much as with Great Britain.

Professor McDonnell is currently at work on several projects, including an examination of the place of the American Revolution in Black American life (with Clare Corbould, Monash University, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and a study of Revolutionary War memoirs written by lower-class veterans of the conflict.

Manisha Sinha (University of Connecticut) specializes in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism, as well as the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press) – named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and recently featured in The New York Times’ 1619 Project — and The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press) — which won multiple awards including the 2017 Frederick Douglass prize. The Slaves’ Cause was also long listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. She is the co-author and co-editor of several other books and the author of numerous articles for both academic and trade publications.

Professor Sinha is currently at work on a book on the reconstruction of American democracy after the Civil War under contract with Liveright (WW Norton), a documentary history of abolition for Yale University Press, and an edited collection of essays on Reconstruction.

Slavery and Freedom in the Era of Revolution: Abolitionism

OI Virtual Conversation with Christopher Brown (Columbia University) and Paul Polgar (University of Mississippi).

Christopher L. Brown (Columbia University) specializes in the history of eighteenth century Britain, the early modern British Empire, and the comparative history of slavery and abolition, with secondary interests in the age of revolutions and the history of the Atlantic world.

The 1996-1998 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute, Professor Brown is the author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Omohundro Institute with partner UNC Press) – a work that was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center as well as the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association — and Arming Slaves: From the Classical Era to the Modern Age (Yale University Press), an edited collection with Philip D. Morgan.

Of Moral Capital, the Times Literary Supplement wrote “say(s) something genuinely new about a subject that has been discussed and written about for two centuries; and that . . . is no small achievement.”

Professor Brown is now writing a book about British experience in Africa in the era of the American Revolution.

Paul J. Polgar (University of Mississippi) is a historian of slavery, race, and abolition in the United States and broader Atlantic world.

The 2013-2015 Omohundro Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, Professor Polgar is the author of Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement (Omohundro Institute with partner UNC Press) – a book that examines the activities of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the New York Manumission Society, and their African American allies during the post-Revolutionary and early national eras.

Manisha Sinha (University of Connecticut) said that Standard-Bearers of Equality “is the best book on the first wave of abolition in the early American Republic, period.”

Professor Polgar is now at work on two projects. He is co-editing a volume of essays that will reinterpret the origins and construction of racial slavery in British North America by placing the 1619 moment into an Atlantic and comparative context. He is also beginning a sole-authored project centering on the early years of Reconstruction in the US that will reexamine how a majority of the Northern white electorate coalesced around an agenda that included a pathbreaking expansion of Black civil and political rights.