The Violent History of Federal Kidnappers
Substack — October 9, 2025
From the fugitive slave laws of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to ICE and the Border Patrol today, the federal government has long been complicit in kidnapping exploited, undocumented workers.
The Gilded Age Roots of American Austerity
Jacobin — July 17, 2025
Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill isn’t just a modern assault on SNAP and Medicaid — it’s the revival of a 150-year-old playbook. From Civil War pensions to modern welfare programs, political elites have long moralized against need while rationing care.
How the First Black Bank Was Looted
Jacobin — June 12, 2025
In the early days of the Gilded Age’s rush for profit, freed people’s savings were siphoned off by politically connected financiers. Justene Hill Edwards’s Savings and Trust uncovers how finance cloaked dispossession in the language of uplift.
The Abolitionist Legacy of the Civil War Belongs to the Left
Jacobin — April 6, 2022
The US Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property. We should draw on that memory today for struggles against racism and capitalism.
“Voting With Your Dollars” Has Always Been a Flawed Idea
Jacobin — February 19, 2022
In the days of the British slave trade, “commercial abolitionists” urged against the purchase of slave-made goods. This business-friendly approach counseled consumer abstention as a form of political advocacy — just like the “ethical capitalism” of today.
How African Americans Fought for Freedom in the Antebellum North
Jacobin — July 13, 2021
We shouldn’t allow the titanic revolution of the Civil War and Reconstruction to obscure a crucial fact: In the antebellum North, an interracial movement fought for, lost, and then kept fighting for black voting rights and equal citizenship rights.
Juneteenth Is About Freedom
Jacobin — June 19, 2021
Today, as we celebrate Juneteenth, we should remember not only the struggle against chattel slavery but the struggle for radical freedom during Reconstruction — snuffed out by the reactionary forces of property and white supremacy.
People, Not “Voices” or “Bodies,” Make History
Jacobin — June 18, 2021
The “voice-giving” that is so central to the mission of liberal philanthropy underscores something essential about the custodial politics at the heart of the American political system. We need to do far more than “give voice to the voiceless" to win justice.
The Southern Division: Freedpeople, Pensions, and Federal State Building in the Post-Confederate South
In Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. David Waldstreicher and Van Gosse (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
From Radical Warrior to Lion in Winter
Common Reader — May 2019
A new prize-winning biography gives us a complete Frederick Douglass.
Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State
Journal of the Civil War Era — September 2017
Tens of thousands of formerly enslaved men and women negotiated the inclusionary politics of the US Pension Bureau on grounds immensely different from their white northern counterparts. In turn, they struggled to define citizenship in a post-emancipation republic still in the grips of the slave past.