University of Wisconsin–Madison
Stephen Kantrowitz

Stephen Kantrowitz

Linda and Stanley Sher Professor of History; faculty affiliate in African American Studies

skantrow@wisc.edu

608.263.1844

Office: 5269 Levy Hall
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
Office Hours: TBA

Stephen Kantrowitz

Biography

Biography

I study race, citizenship, and Native-settler interaction in the United States, particularly in the nineteenth century. I am interested in the connections between the histories of slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction and the dynamics of Native American life and U.S. conquest; in questions and projects of historical reckoning; and in the ways narrative and genre function in historical writing.

I am currently working on two books. During AY 2026-28, as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, I will be writing a history of U.S. citizenship aimed at non-academic readers, tentatively entitled “Who is an American?” I am also in the early stages of a project on a group of twentieth-century intellectuals (Alfred Kroeber, Theodora Kroeber, their daughter Ursula Le Guin, and the circle around them) who used anthropology, history, science fiction, and other disciplines and approaches to reckon with histories of genocide, slavery, and colonialism.

My recent published work explores the transformations of American citizenship in the Civil War era through the experiences of the Ho-Chunk people. This work includes a book, Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the 19th-Century United States (UNC Press, 2023), and several articles: “White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and the Two Citizenships of the Fourteenth Amendment” in The Journal of the Civil War Era; “Jurisdiction, Civilization, and the Ends of Native American Citizenship: The View from 1866” (which won the Oscar A. Winther Award for the year’s best article in the Western Historical Quarterly); and “Unvanishing: Indigenous Wisconsin and the Legacy of Charles Brown,” in The Wisconsin Magazine of History.

I have explored related questions as co-convenor (along with Malinda Maynor Lowery and Alyssa Mt. Pleasant) of a symposium on “Campuses and Colonialism” (Clements Center for Southwest Studies, SMU, and Center for the Study of the American South, UNC). Campuses and Colonialism, a co-edited collection of essays developed in this symposium, explores the relationship between Native Americans and U.S. institutions of higher education. The book has been offered an advance contract by UNC Press.

My work in Native American history builds on questions of nineteenth-century politics and citizenship that I explored in my earlier scholarship on the South and New England. My first book, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2000), explored the politics of white supremacy in the post-Civil War South through the career of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a slaveholder’s son who devoted himself to restoring his class’s social, political, and economic dominance. That book won the Ellis Hawley prize from the Organization of American Historians and was a New York Times Notable Book. I remain interested in the long history of white supremacist ideology and politics, and I was a lead co-author of a report on the history of the Ku Klux Klan at UW-Madison (pdf).

My second book, More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin, 2012), showed how Boston’s nineteenth-century black activists built a political community, helped to bring about the Civil War, and bound the policy of slave emancipation to the ideal of political equality. More Than Freedom was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Lincoln Prize. A co-edited collection, All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry (Cornell, 2013) also emerged from this research.

My public-facing work includes projects within and beyond the university. In addition to my work on the history of the Ku Klux Klan on our campus in the 1920s, I worked closely with the Public History Project, which explored histories of exclusion and resistance at UW-Madison. I then chaired the advisory committee for that project’s successor, the Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History. I have also been involved in the campus’s reckoning with its Native past and present, Our Shared Future, and with a Ho-Chunk-led community project, the Teejop Community History Project, which recently gave rise to a community-wide program of public art. I frequently engage audiences outside the university; among other projects, I helped devise and teach the Justified Anger Initiative’s community course “Black History for a New Day.”

My teaching includes a lecture course on slavery and the Civil War Era and “Who is an American?,” a thematic survey of U.S. history, as well as seminars on a wide array of topics. Earlier in my career I helped design and lead several field courses focusing on the American South, including a 2001 “Freedom Ride” summer course and a 2004 visit to Selma, Alabama. I have received several teaching awards, including a Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

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), a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern Demark (2016-17), and an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer (2008-present). At UW-Madison I have been named a Hamel Family Faculty Fellow, a Kellett Mid-Career Faculty Researcher, a Senior Fellow the UW Institute for Research in the Humanities, a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, Plaenert Bascom Professor (2020-2025), and, most recently, Linda and Stanley Sher Professor of History (2025- ). In 2025 I received an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark, and in 2026 I was awarded a two-year Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

 

 

Education

Ph.D., Princeton
M.A., Princeton
B.A., Yale

Books

Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States

Stephen Kantrowitz. Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States. The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

This concise and revealing history reconsiders the Civil War era by centering one Native American tribe’s encounter with citizenship. In 1837, eleven years before Wisconsin’s admission as a state, representatives of the Ho-Chunk people yielded under immense duress and signed a treaty that ceded their remaining ancestral lands to the U.S. government. Over the four decades that followed, as “free soil” settlement repeatedly demanded their further expulsion, many Ho-Chunk people lived under the U.S. government’s policies of “civilization,” allotment, and citizenship. Others lived as outlaws, evading military campaigns to expel them and adapting their ways of life to new circumstances. After the Civil War, as Reconstruction’s vision of nonracial, national, birthright citizenship excluded most Native Americans, the Ho-Chunk who remained in their Wisconsin homeland understood and exploited this contradiction. Professing eagerness to participate in the postwar nation, they gained the right to remain in Wisconsin as landowners and voters while retaining their language, culture, and identity as a people. This history of Ho-Chunk sovereignty and citizenship offer a bracing new perspective on citizenship’s perils and promises, the way the broader nineteenth-century conflict between “free soil” and slaveholding expansion shaped Indigenous life, and the continuing impact of Native people’s struggles and claims on U.S. politics and society.

All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry

Stephen Kantrowitz. All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry. Cornell University Press, 2013.

In early March 1775, an Irish soldier initiated a dozen or more black Bostonian men into a lodge of Freemasons, making them probably the first people of African descent formally admitted into Freemasonry in the Atlantic world. Prince Hall, a freedman, would emerge as the leader of this group as they worked together to establish a tradition of African American Freemasonry that has persisted ever since—a tradition that still carries his name. All Men Free and Brethren is the first in-depth historical consideration of Prince Hall freemasonry from the Revolutionary era to the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a growing network of lodges, African American Masons together promoted fellowship, Christianity, and social respectability, while standing against slavery and white supremacy. The contributors to this book examine key aspects in the history of the Prince Hall Masons, from accounts of specific lodges and leaders to broader themes in African American history: abolitionist activism, the limits of freedom during Reconstruction, political oration, the role of women in the black community, and relationships between Masonry and African American churches. Also included are several appendixes containing key texts from Prince Hall Masonry, a glossary of Masonic terms, and lists of archival repositories and contact information for present-day lodges. Edited by Peter P. Hinks and Stephen Kantrowitz, All Men Free and Brethren is a major contribution of the history of Freemasonry, African American history, and the broader history of race, citizenship, and community in the United States.

More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic

Stephen Kantrowitz. More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic. Penguin Press, 2012.

Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is generally understood as the moment African Americans became free, and Reconstruction as the ultimately unsuccessful effort to extend that victory by establishing equal citizenship. In More Than Freedom, award-winning historian Stephen Kantrowitz boldly redefines our understanding of this entire era by showing that the fight to abolish slavery was always part of a much broader campaign to establish full citizenship for African Americans and find a place to belong in a white republic. More Than Freedom chronicles this epic struggle through the lived experiences of black and white activists in and around Boston, including both famous reformers such as Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner and lesser-known but equally important figures like the journalist William Cooper Nell and the ex-slaves Lewis and Harriet Hayden. While these freedom fighters have traditionally been called abolitionists, their goals and achievements went far beyond emancipation. They mobilized long before they had white allies to rely on and remained militant long after the Civil War ended. These black freedmen called themselves “colored citizens” and fought to establish themselves in American public life, both by building their own networks and institutions and by fiercely, often violently, challenging proslavery and inegalitarian laws and prejudice. But as Kantrowitz explains, they also knew that until the white majority recognized them as equal participants in common projects they would remain a suspect class. Equal citizenship meant something far beyond freedom: not only full legal and political rights, but also acceptance, inclusion and respect across the color line. Even though these reformers ultimately failed to remake the nation in the way they hoped, their struggle catalyzed the arrival of Civil War and left the social and political landscape of the Union forever altered. Without their efforts, war and Reconstruction could hardly have begun. Bringing a bold new perspective to one of our nation’s defining moments, More Than Freedom helps to explain the extent and the limits of the so-called freedom achieved in 1865 and the legacy that endures today.

Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

Stephen Kantrowitz. Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. UNC Press, 2000.

Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina’s self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state’s black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South. Friend and foe alike–and generations of historians–interpreted Tillman’s physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman’s white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.

Videos & Podcasts

Selected Publications

  • “‘Not Quite Constitutionalized’: The Meanings of ‘Civilization’ and the Limits of Native American Citizenship,” in ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2015), 75-105.
  • “Citizen’s Clothing: Reconstruction, Ho-Chunk Persistence, and the Politics of Dress,” in ed. Adam Arenson and Andrew Graybill, Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 242-264.
  • “’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.

Invited Talks & Research Presentations

  • Invited Panelist, “Academic Freedom in Flux: Navigating Research, Responsibility, and Public Trust in Transformative Times,” Danish Institute for Advanced Study, Odense, Oct. 30, 2025
  • Invited Panelist, “Birthright Citizenship,” Immigration History Research Center, Univ. of Minnesota, Sept. 17, 2025
  • Invited presentation on Ho-Chunk history with Ho-Chunk Museum Director Josie Lee, History Forum, Minnesota Historical Society, Feb. 15, 2025
  • Invited Lecture, “Citizens of a Stolen Land,” University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Nov. 13, 2024
  • Reading and community discussion on Citizens of a Stolen Land, Angel De Cora Museum and Research Center, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Nov. 9, 2024
  • Annual Meeting keynote, “How the Ho-Chunk Thwarted Removal from Wisconsin,” Sheboygan County Historical Research Center,” Oct. 11, 2024
  • Invited Lecture, “Citizens of a Stolen Land,” American Antiquarian Society Webinar series, May 21, 2024
  • Friends of the UW Libraries, discussion of Citizens of a Stolen Land with Ho-Chunk Museum Director Josie Lee, Chazen Museum, UW-Madison, March 12, 2024
  • Kendrick Kelley lecture, “A Ho-Chunk History of American Citizenship,” Davidson College, Feb. 22, 2024
  • “The Significance of the Frontier Ho-Chunk in American History,” Focus on the Humanities Lecture, Center for the Humanities, UW-Madison, April 12, 2022

Advisor To

Selected Awards

  • Honorary Doctorate, University of Southern Denmark, 2025
  • Linda and Stanley Sher Professorship, 2025-
  • Elected Member, American Antiquarian Society, 2019
  • Plaenert Bascom Professorship, 2020-25
  • Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, 2016-17
  • 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
  • Ellis W. Hawley Book Prize, Organization of American Historians, 2001
  • Outstanding Achievement, Wisconsin Library Association, 2001
  • Karen F. Johnson Award for Undergraduate Teaching in History, 2000
  • George C. Rogers, Jr. Book Prize, South Carolina Historical Society, 2000
  • New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 2000

History Courses

  • History 154 – Who is an American?
  • History 201 – Homeland, Hometown: Native and Settler Places
  • History 393 – Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, 1848-1877 – Syllabus 2026 (pdf)
  • History 600 – Citizens and Others in North American History
  • History 710 – Writing the Past: How Historians Tell Stories – Syllabus 2026 (pdf)
  • History 952 – Citizens, Subjects, and Others in the Modern World