Stephen Kantrowitz
Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Faculty Affiliate in American Indian Studies

Email: skantrow@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)263-1844
Office: 5119 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5017 Mosse Humanities

Curriculum Vitae: View PDF

Office Hours: TBA

Education: PhD: Princeton; MA: Princeton; BA: Yale

Bio Sketch:

I am a historian of the nineteenth-century United States. My research and teaching center on the relationships among race, politics, and citizenship. I am particularly interested in individual subjects, not necessarily as the focus of traditional biographies but as windows through which broader transformations can be understood and interpreted. After a decade of research on the politics of white supremacy in the post-Civil War South—which produced my book, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy -- I shifted focus to explore the political lives of Boston's nineteenth-century black activists. My second book, More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889, was published by Penguin Press in 2012. An edited collection which also emerged from this research, All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry, will appear from Cornell University Press in the spring of 2013. I am currently working on projects that follow up on More Than Freedom, and I am in the early stages of a project about the removal of the Ho-Chunk people from Wisconsin during the nineteenth century and the light this process sheds on the broader transformations of American citizenship in the Civil War era.

I regularly teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the nineteenth-century U.S., the Civil War era, slavery, and slave revolts. I have begun to offer courses in Native American history as well. Earlier in my career I helped design and lead several field courses focusing on the American South, including 2001's "Freedom Ride" summer course and a 2004 follow-up visit to Selma, Alabama and the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute.

I received my Ph.D. from Princeton in 1995, where I worked with Nell Irvin Painter, Daniel Rodgers, and James McPherson. I have been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2002-03) and the UW Institute for Research in the Humanities (2001).

In 2007 I was named a Hamel Family Faculty Fellow and an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. In 2013 I was named a Kellett Mid-Career Faculty Researcher.

Research Interests:

Reconstruction (North and South); race and politics; white supremacy; citizenship; free black and black Northern life; nineteenth-century Native America; Southern history; masculinity.

Selected Publications:

• More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin Press, 2012)
• co-editor, All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry (Cornell, 2013)
• Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2000)
• “’Intended for the Better Government of Man’: The Political History of African American Freemasonry in the Era of Emancipation,” Journal of American History (March 2010)
• "A Place for 'Colored Patriots': Crispus Attucks Among the Abolitionists, 1842-1863," Massachusetts Historical Review (spring 2009)
• “Fighting Like Men: Civil War Dilemmas of Abolitionist Manhood,” in Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the U.S. Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• "Youngest Living Carpetbagger Tells All, or How Regional Myopia Created 'Pitchfork Ben' Tillman," Southern Cultures 8.3 (fall 2002), 18-37.
• "Ben Tillman and Hendrix McLane, Agrarian Rebels: White Manhood, 'The Farmers,' and the Limits of Southern Populism," The Journal of Southern History LXVI (August 2000), 497-524.
• "One Man's Mob is Another Man's Militia: Violence, Manhood, and Authority in Reconstruction South Carolina" in Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds., Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 67-87.
• "The Two Faces of Domination in North Carolina, 1800-1898" in David Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 95-112.
• "White Supremacist Justice and the Rule of Law: Lynching, Honor, and the State in Ben Tillman's South Carolina" in Pieter Spierenburg, ed., Men and Violence: Masculinity, Honor Codes and Violent Rituals in Europe and America (Ohio State University Press, 1998), 213-239.

Awards:

Book Awards:

• Ellis W. Hawley Book Prize, Organization of American Historians, 2001
• Outstanding Achievement, Wisconsin Library Association, 2001
• George C. Rogers, Jr. Book Prize, South Carolina Historical Society, 2000
• New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 2000

Teaching Awards:

• UW History organization Instructor of the Year, 2010
• Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Teaching, 2001
• Mark H. Ingraham Distinguished Faculty Award, 2001
• Outstanding Credit Program, North Amer. Assoc. of Summer Sessions, 2001
• Karen F. Johnson Award for Undergraduate Teaching in History, 2000

Courses Taught:

Lecture Courses:

• History 150 - American Histories: 19th Century - Syllabus 2011 (pdf)
• History 258 - American South (not recently offered)
• History 393 - Civil War Era, 1848-1877 - Syllabus 2013 (pdf)

Undergraduate Seminars:

• History 200 - The Historian’s Craft Origins of the U.S. Civil War - Syllabus 2012 (pdf)
• History 283 - Honors Seminar - Topics: "Slave Revolts in the Americas" - Syllabus 2011 (pdf)
• History 500 - Reading Seminar in History - Topics: "Race in North America; Slavery and Freedom, 1840-1880"; "Native Madison After Removal" - Syllabus 2012 (pdf)
• History 600 - Advanced Seminar in History - Topics: "The Right to Vote" - Syllabus 2008 (pdf); "Selma and America" - Syllabus 2004 (pdf); "Slavery and Antislavery; White Supremacy"; "American Anti-Slavery Movements" - Syllabus 2007 (pdf); "Black Abolitionists" - Syllabus 2011 (pdf)

Graduate Courses:

• History 900 - Introduction to History for American Historians - Syllabus 2006 (pdf)
• History 901 - Studies in American History - Topics: "Slavery and Freedom, North and South" - Syllabus 2004 (pdf); "Southern History; Populism and 'The People'"
• History 902 - Research Seminar: American History
• History 925 - Seminar: American History in the Civil War Era - Topic: "Slavery, Politics, and Citizenship in 19th-Century America" - Syllabus 2007 (pdf); "Slaves' Politics and the Politics of Slavery" Syllabus 2009 (pdf)