• Joshua D. Rothman
  Associate Professor
  Director, Summersell Center for the Study of the South
  Ph.D., University of Virginia, 2000
  
  jrothman@bama.ua.edu
  
  

  Teaching and Research Interests:

• Nineteenth Century America
• Southern History
• Race and Slavery
• Social and Cultural History

Courses Taught:

• American South to 1865
• American South, 1865-1929
• American Civilization to 1865
• Slavery in American Popular Culture, 1845-Present
• Reform Movements in Antebellum America
• The Nineteenth Century American West
• Proseminar and Seminar on Southern History, 1776-1865 (Graduate)
• Literature of American History to 1865 (Graduate)
• Proseminar and Seminar in United States History to 1877 (Graduate)

Recent Publications:

• "The Contours of Cotton Capitalism: Slavery, Speculation, and Economic Panic in Mississippi, 1832-1841," in Seth Rockman and Sven Beckert, eds., Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming, 2012).
• Reforming America, 1815-1860: a Norton Documents Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).
• "'The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence, and the Anxieties of America's Market Revolution," Journal of American History 95 (December 2008): 651-77.
• Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
• "Hardly Sallygate: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the Sex Scandal That Wasn't," in Juliet A. Williams and Paul Apostolidis, eds., Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004): 101-33.
• "'Notorious in the Neighborhood': An Interracial Family in Early National and Antebellum Virginia," Journal of Southern History 67 (February 2001): 73-114.
• "James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum Virginia," in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, eds. Jan Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999): 87-113.
• “‘To Be Freed from Thate Curs and Let at Liberty’: Interracial Adultery and Divorce in Antebellum Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 106 (Autumn 1998): 443-81.

Current Project:

• Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of the South and America in the Age of Jackson (forthcoming, University of Georgia Press, 2012).
  
  

My current project is a study of America's southwestern frontier during the economic boom of the 1830s known as the "flush times." I am closely examining a series of gambling riots and slave insurrection scares, using them a lens through which to understand the social, cultural, and political implications of expansion and speculative capitalism in the antebellum United States. This project has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Office for Sponsored Programs at the University of Alabama, the Deep South Regional Humanities Center, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Academic Libraries, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and a joint award from the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Hobbies:

• Very slow but determined running.
• Baseball, baseball, baseball.
• Rooting in futility for the Mets.
• Wishing I could emulate the cushy lifestyle of my cat.
• Chasing after my children.