Francis Russo

Biography

I am a historian of early and nineteenth-century America, with a focus on political economy, intellectual life, and social reform. My research and teaching interests are motivated by concerns within the history of capitalism, slavery and antislavery, democracy, social movements, intellectual, social and political history, and the history and philosophy of American Pragmatism.

My current research broadly explores how antislavery ideology and capitalist development shaped the moral and material foundations of freedom in the United States. I explore these and related themes in my current book project, New Moral Worlds: Socialism, Antislavery, and Selfhood in the American Republic, which examines the rise and transformation of communitarian reform in North America, from its early modern origins to the early nineteenth century. Tracing the movement’s development across the Northeast, Midwest, and beyond—including in Mexico and Haiti—the project investigates how communitarians navigated tensions between theory and practice, and how, in the context of slavery and antislavery, their philosophical commitments increasingly diverged from other reformers in practice, particularly over questions of selfhood, property, economic organization, and the process of social change. The project brings to light the contradictions, tensions, and ambiguities among reformers before the Civil War, providing a crucial context for understanding the triumph and tragedy of Reconstruction after it.

I am presently preparing other projects for publication. One is an article-length study of the ideological dimensions of gradual abolition in early North America. Another is a biographical profile of the reformer Frances Wright and her distinctive approach to the problems of gradual abolition, political economy, and democracy in the United States. A third is a methodological reflection on the historian David Brion Davis, antislavery’s capitalism, and American Pragmatism as a historical sensibility.

My published scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in Reviews in American History, the New England Quarterly, and an edited volume titled Social Movements and American Political Thought. This work explores topics in communitarian reform, the sensory history of early American religious experience, and American Revolution historiography and its future at the approach of the 250th anniversary of 1776.

My research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, John Carter Brown Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, University of Michigan Library, Economic History Association, History of Economics Society, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, among others.

Education

Selected Publications

History Courses