Cambridge American History Seminar Podcast

“We’re still, as a society, so apprehensive about ascribing to women a nature of violence. When we do, we often use pathological discourses as a way of explaining why these women would be exceptions to the rule.”  Note: this episode describes sexual violence and bodily harm.Our guest, Dr Erin Shearer, is a Fellow in Residence at the Rothermere American Institute (University of Oxford), Associate Lecturer in History and Postgraduate Visiting Fellow (University of Reading), and Associate Tutor (University of Warwick).  The paper ‘Enslaved Women, Infanticide, and a Feminist History of Harm: A New Direction in Slavery Studies’  emerges from Shearer's current monograph, which asks:  How and why did enslaved women in the antebellum US South use violence as a form of resistance?  Challenging long-standing historiography, Dr Erin Shearer finds that deliberate, retributive acts of violence were not the preserve of enslaved men, but a shared and interchangeable phenomenon. This paper intervenes in a largely unexplored area of scholarship by examining enslaved women’s acts of harm and infanticide against the white planter-class children of their enslavers.Using new methodological approaches to slavery's archive, and applying an intersectional Feminist History of Harm, Dr Shearer sheds critical light on the inner lives and motivations that inform why women facilitated acts of violence within, and against, slavery's coercive regime.  This episode explores what it means to take women’s violence seriously—and why doing so alters how we understand lived experiences of slavery, resistance, and historical method. “It’s important that we give women the same complexity that we’ve given men, and that we look at women as multifaceted beings…the good, the bad, and the ugly.” See Dr Shearer's recent article: Shearer, “Challenging the Overseer: Enslaved Women’s Violent Resistance in the US Antebellum South.” (ANCH, 2025) And related episodes:Prof. Emily West, 'Enslaved Women and the Duality of Feeding in the Antebellum South' Prof. Sophie White, 'His Master's Grace": Extra-Judicial Violence in Atlantic Slave Societies' 04:37Library of Congress – WPA Slave Narratives 10:28King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (2nd ed. 2011)10:56Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2020)17:24 Nunley, “Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts ” (JSH, 2021)Nunley, The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia (2023)Taylor, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance (2023)22:00Johnson, “On Agency” (JSH, 2003)and “Agency: A Ghost Story” in Foner & Johnson, Slavery's Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (2011)22:38Maglaque, “Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe” (JEMH, 2025)25:54West & Shearer, “Fertility Control, Shared Nurturing, and Dual Exploitation: The Lives of Enslaved Mothers in the Antebellum United States” (WHR, 2018)Knight, “Mothering and Labour in the Slaveholding Households of the Antebellum American South” (P&P, 2020)27:34Hall, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021)Hosted this week by:  Daisy Semmler, MPhil (2025), Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge Daisy researches how enslaved and free Black communities learned to read and write during the anti-literacy period in the continental United States (c.1740–1865).  

When we think about the founding documents of the United States, two likely come to mind: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But perhaps not the third — the Treaty of Paris (1783), the agreement that ended the Revolutionary War and formally recognized American independence. Our guest this week, Professor Eliga H. Gould, argues that this largely forgotten founding document is essential for understanding how the United States actually came into being. Far from a clean moment of national birth, the treaty emerged from the aftermath of a brutal civil war, triggering mass displacement, contested borders, and fragile diplomatic compromises within and beyond British North America.  Eliga H. Gould is the (2025-26) Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at University of Oxford and (for 30+ years) the Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.   Gould’s new book project, Peace and Independence: The Turbulent History of the United States’ Founding Treaty, examines the social, economic, and constitutional consequences of the 1783 Paris Treaty.  The three themes guiding this research project are the making, unmaking, and remaking of the American Union; the uncertain fate of the “new order” many believed the Revolution had inaugurated; and the enduring theme of partition.  Along the way, we also reflect on what treaties actually do. Gould argues that treaties rarely produce clean independence; instead, they bind nations into global systems of diplomacy, commerce, and compromise — a lesson with enduring implications for American foreign policy. “Exiting the world has never been a viable option.” Co-hosts (PhD Candidates) Shea Hendry's research examines the children of Loyalist refugees who embodied both American citizenship and British subjecthood — concurrently and consecutively — throughout the Early National period. Megan Renoir looks at the history of U.S. land institutions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT. She aims to expanding our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions, and intractable land conflicts.  Editing, production, and cover art by Daisy Semmler, Cantab American History MPhil Graduate.  

“In 2024…the number of children and teachers killed in school shootings surpassed not only military, but active police duty deaths. So our entire carceral and military apparatus had fewer fatalities than children and teachers in schools. And we’ve gone up since then. We’re on a steady inflection up.”Our guest academic this week, Dr Kathleen Belew, is a historian of the present. She defines the current period in the United States as an “Age of Mass Violence” that begins in 1999 with Columbine — not because it was the first school shooting, but because it marked the start of treating school shootings as a “normal part” of American life.“Thoughts and prayers,” Belew explains, “is a phrase that comes out of that moment. We can historicize it precisely to Columbine… At the time, ‘thoughts and prayers’ was sort of the deepest, most compassionate social response that we could come up with to the slaughter of children.” Thoughts and Prayers is also the chilling title of her current research project — and the starting point for one of her central questions: why did this refrain come to stand in for political action?In this conversation, we dissect how fear and suburban isolation have normalised gun violence, and why children have come to occupy a tragic central place in America’s culture of mass shootings. Belew reflects on the relationship between private violence and state power, the spiritual framing of mass violence, and the possibilities for reimagining community safety in an era defined by fear and fragmentation.Throughout, we consider what it means to write a history of the present — and how historical thinking might help open pathways toward collective responsibility, hope, and change.Kathleen Belew is Associate Professor of American Studies at Northwestern University. She is also an expert on the white power movement and the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2019).Co-hosts:Dr Hugh Wood recently completed his PhD at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His research examines the relationship between private violence and American state building in the second half of the nineteenth century.Megan Renoir is a PhD Candidate at Homerton College, Cambridge. She studies the relationship between Western property institutions, state development, and violence against minorities, including Indigenous dispossession.Editing, production, and cover art:by Daisy Semmler, American History MPhil Graduate from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

‘Why do people look at Black people the way they do?’ This is the central provocation of our guest scholar's work. Dr Brenna Greer is an African Americanist and Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. Her work traverses the histories of culture, race, gender, and, more recently, citizenship in the United States. We discuss her paper, “African Americans and the Photographic Seat of Honour,” which emerges from her ongoing project examining self-portraits created by African Americans, particularly in the nineteenth century.Questions of historical process and causality drive her research: How did these portraits shape ideals and images of Blackness? And how might they help teach students and wider publics about the Black past—Black freedom, activism, and protest?Co-hosts: Megan Renoir (PhD Candidate) researches Indigenous sovereignty and land conflict. Megan’s recent publication looked at“Recognition as Resilience: How an Unrecognized Indigenous Nation is Using Visibility as a Pathway Toward Restorative Justice". Sam Lanevi (PhD Candidate) researches World War II fraternization and war bride policy with a particular focus on German and Japanese war brides.Editing, production and cover art by Daisy Semmler (Cantab MPhil Graduate).Thanks for listening.This episode was recorded on 26/5/2025.

Dr Kaeten Mistry discusses his current research on the history of secrecy and the tensions it raises between civil liberties and national security. This draws from Chapter 2 of his current book project, The Secrecy Regime (working title), which traces U.S. state secrecy from its early twentieth-century origins to the present.Dr Mistry is a scholar of the United States and the world, specialising in foreign relations, the international and transnational history of the Cold War, and more recently, cultures of secrecy and intelligence. He has also worked on aspects of modern European history, in particular: Italy.This was recorded on 19/5/2025. Co-hosts: Megan Renoir (PhD Candidate) researches Indigenous sovereignty and land conflict. Megan’s recent publication looked at“Recognition as Resilience: How an Unrecognized Indigenous Nation is Using Visibility as a Pathway Toward Restorative Justice,”. Mary Foster (Megan's sister) is a third-year undergraduate student at McGill University, majoring in History with a minor in medieval studies.Editing, production and cover art by Daisy Semmler (Cantab MPhil graduate).Thanks for listening.

Please note that this episode contains discussion of sexual violence.This week, PhD candidates Sam Lanevi and Megan Renoir sit down with Dr. Kaisha Esty to discuss her current research project.Dr. Esty is Assistant Professor of History, African American Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She’s on sabbatical this year as an AAUW postdoctoral fellow and resident fellow at the Rothermere American Institute.Her work explores the lives of African American women in the nineteenth century, during the transition from slavery to emancipation. She focuses on the strategies and values that shaped their intimate lives and sense of self, situating these within the broader context of U.S. nation building and westward expansion.The article Kaisha refers to is linked here: Kaisha Esty, ““I Told Him to Let Me Alone, That He Hurt Me”: Black Women and Girls and the Battle over Labor and Sexual Consent in Union-Occupied Territory,” Labor (2022) 19 (1): 32–51. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-9475702Co-hosts: Megan Renoir (PhD Candidate) researches the history of US land institutions, 19th and 20th century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT, with the aim of informing and expanding our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions and intractable land conflicts.Sam Lanevi (PhD Candidate) researches World War II fraternization and war bride policy with a particular focus on German and Japanese war brides.Editing, production and cover art by Daisy Semmler (Cambridge MPhil Graduand). 

“We Don’t Call Them Wars Anymore,” explores the history of international intervention after the Second World War, and how the role of the United Nations has shifted over time.We speak with Dr. Lydia Walker, Assistant Professor and Myers Chair in Global Military History at Ohio State University, and author of the multiple award-winning book ‘States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonisation’ (Cambridge University Press, 2024). In our conversation, you’ll hear how and why she pays attention to so-called “border walkers”, the historical actors involved in a UN Observer Mission in Kashmir, a region of conflict related to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The UN Kashmir mission was deemed successful precisely because no one outside the region knew it existed.“So,” Dr. Walker asks, “What does it mean to have an observer mission that performs best when it’s unobserved?”The scholarship suggested for consultation at (04:30) is: Mridu Rai, “Kashmir: From Princely State to Insurgency,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Asian History, 2018.Hosts: PhD Candidate Caleb Woodall - Caleb’s research concerns the material and intellectual lives of America’s WW2 conscientious objectors. I am particularly interested in the ways in which gender shaped their experiencesPhD Candidate Megan Renoir - researches Indigenous sovereignty and land conflict. Megan’s recent publication looked at“Recognition as Resilience: How an Unrecognized Indigenous Nation is Using Visibility as a Pathway Toward Restorative Justice." Editing, production and cover art by Daisy Semmler.

Dr. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrékor Wé Oblahii kè Oblayéé Mantsè) — Associate Professor of History and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University — discusses his book: 'Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America '(The University of North Carolina Press, 2023). His book examines how African-descended peoples engaged in liberation movements based on their shared Black and African identities. Temporally, it spans the long 20th century, from late Reconstruction to the year 2000.Adjetey employs nuanced notions of the concept ‘Pan-Africanism’ in his book. The ‘big’ Pan-Africanism encompasses the self-determination and emancipation of the African continent and its peoples; while other, ‘lowercase Pan-Africanisms’ emphasise Black pride and cultural identity, without always being tied to nation-building.Co-hosts: Darold Cuba, PhD Candidate. Darold researches how Black landowners forged autonomous “freedom colonies” after emancipation, linking their resistance to Jim Crow racism to a global tradition of post-emancipation marronage.Megan Renoir, PhD Candidate. Megan’s area of focus is Indigenous sovereignty and land conflict. Editing, production and cover art by Daisy Semmler. Thanks for listening. Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction(02:39) The Genesis of ‘Cross-Border Cosmopolitans’(05:19) Primary Intervention in the Broader Historiography(09:03) Unpacking ‘Pan-Africanisms’(12:35) The Stories Being Told(21:15) Canada, Borderlands, and Cross-Border Dynamics(25:54) The Significance of Mobility(30:15) Dr Adjetey’s Research Process(40:19) Lessons and Takeaways

In this episode of the Cambridge American History Seminar Podcast, we’re joined by Dr Tara Bynum, Associate Professor of English & African American Studies at the University of Iowa. She discusses a paper related to her book project, titled: ‘Obour Tanner Makes an Archive: Or, How to Remember Your Famous (and Deceased) 18th-Century Friend, Phillis Wheatley.’Dr. Bynum’s research centres on a remarkable set of letters written between 1772 and 1779 by two eighteenth-century enslaved Black women: Phillis Wheatley and her close friend, Obour Tanner. Bynum’s work reveals how personal artifacts like these can reshape the way we think about archives. She invites engagement with these letters not just as collections of facts, but as spaces of grief, memory, and imagination. Co-Hosts:Megan Renoir, PhD Candidate at Cambridge University. Megan researches Indigenous sovereignty and land conflict. Shea Hendry, PhD Candidate at Cambridge University. Shea’s research examines the children of loyalist refugees who embodied both American citizenship and British subjecthood, concurrently and consecutively, throughout the Early National Period.  Editing, production and cover art by Daisy Semmler.Thanks for listening. Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction(01:40) Dr. Bynum’s work(03:40) The Historical Actors(05:13) Placing This Story within Broader Research(06:43) Methodology(11:08) The Archive(18:59) The Contents of the Letters(23:24) Interpretation, and Contending with the “Happy Slave” Narrative(28:56) How Teaching Reveals Nuance(33:25) Pancakes and Cultural Crisis(35:40) Accessing Wheatley and Tanner’s Relationship in their Correspondence(40:33) Animating Lessons from Dr. Bynum’s Work

In this special episode, we’re joined by the incoming Paul Mellon Professor, Dr. Mia Bay.Dr. Bay is a leading scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history.She has won multiple book awards. Some of her influential works include ‘The White Image in the Black Mind’ (Oxford University Press, 2000), ‘Travelling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance’ (Harvard University Press, 2021), and key biographical texts on the anti-lynching crusader, Ida B. Wells, including ‘To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells’ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and ‘The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader’ (Penguin Books, 2014).Bay’s research explores the history of ideas about race, the intellectual contributions of Black women, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. Her current book project considers the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson.We’re thrilled to welcome Dr. Bay and grateful to her for sharing her time to discuss her career, her research, her perspective on the field of history today, and her vision for her new role at Cambridge.Co-Hosts:Megan Renoir, PhD Candidate. Megan researches Indigenous sovereignty and land conflict.Shea Hendry, PhD Candidate. Shea’s research examines the children of loyalist refugees who embodied both American citizenship and British subjecthood, concurrently and consecutively, throughout the Early National Period.Producer:Daisy Semmler, US History MPhil graduand. Daisy’s dissertation investigated how enslaved African-descended women, men and children secretly learned to read and write in unfreedom.Cover art by Daisy Semmler.Thanks for listening.

Axel Schäfer, Professor in American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, and of U.S. History at the Obama Institute, joins us in this episode. He discusses the paper he gave in our seminar, titled 'The “Tempest Tost” and the “People of Plenty”: Migration and the Politics of Consumption in the U.S. Since the 1880s.'Professor Schäfer examines the relationship between immigration, consumer capitalism, and welfare state-building from the 1880s through the twentieth century. He discusses how consumerism, while seemingly more inclusive than citizenship, still reinforces ethnoracial stratifications.Schäfer considers how the figure of the consumer emerged during the transition from producer to consumer capitalism, and locates a contradictory dynamic of consumer society, as contingent upon both the affluent consumer and the cheap laborer, and (quoting Schäfer), ‘by the same token, if you look at the subjectivities again, self-images, you need both the kind of unhinged consumer and the regimented worker.’Co-hosted by: PhD Candidate Megan Renoir, who researches Indigenous sovereignty and land conflict.Co-hosted by: PhD Candidate, Kris Dekatris, who researches radical political dissent to US foreign policy between the First World War and the Vietnam War.Edited and produced by Daisy SemmlerCover art by Daisy Semmler

In this episode, we’re talking with Molly Warsh, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, about her new book project, 'Servants of the Seasons.' Molly is also an editor of the Journal of Early Modern History. We dive into how her work is reshaping our understanding of iterancy, labour, and seasonality in the early modern world—and what it means to study both people and environments in flux. Molly shares how she has shifted from American to world history, why she embraces interdisciplinary methods, and what it takes to recover hidden or 'extinct' histories—including those of non-human actors, like tuna. We also touch on why seasonal and migrant labour histories are historically relevant to contemporary political discourse.Co-hosted by Megan Renoir and Shea Hendry, PhD Candidates at Cambridge UniversityEdited and produced by Daisy Semmler, US History MPhil Student at Cambridge University Cover art by Daisy Semmler

In this episode, we’re joined by Kimberly Welch, Associate Professor of History and Law at Vanderbilt University. Kim is currently a Fellow-in-Residence at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. She spoke with us about the paper she presented in the seminar, titled “Eulalie Mandeville’s Money: A Free Black Woman and Her Legacy in Antebellum New Orleans.” It’s part of her current book project, which follows the intertwined lives of two free people of color — Eulalie Mandeville and Bernard Soulié — across New Orleans, Santiago de Cuba, and Paris. Her work examines how discriminatory laws around marriage and inheritance shaped the transmission of wealth across generations for Black Americans.To get a better sense of the world Kim brings to life in her forthcoming book, Megan and I revisited her 2022 article:"The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans." The Journal of the Civil War Era 12, no. 4 (2022): 473-502.https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2022.0065.Co-hosted by: Megan Renoir, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge whose work focuses on Indigenous sovereignty and land conflict. See Megan’s recent publication here: “Recognition as Resilience: How an Unrecognized Indigenous Nation is Using Visibility as a Pathway Toward Restorative Justice”, The American Historical Review, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae467and Daisy Semmler, a Master of Philosophy student in American History at Cambridge, whose research explores the pedagogy of clandestine literacy under African American slavery. Edited by Daisy Semmler

Today on the podcast, we speak with Elizabeth Ellis, Associate Professor of History at Princeton University, about her recent book titled ‘The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South’ (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).Professor Ellis focuses on Indigenous polities in early America, and how decisions made by Native nations with strategically small governance structures had substantive impacts on how their own people survived colonisation, as well as on the unfolding of empires and colonial entanglements in the lower Mississippi Valley. Co-hosted by Shea Hendry and Megan Renoir (PhD Candidates at Cambridge University)Edited and produced by Daisy Semmler (MPhil American History Student at Cambridge University)Cover Art by Daisy Semmler

This week on the podcast, PhD candidates Hugh Wood and Megan Renoir sit down with Sophie FitzMaurice, Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. Sophie discusses her paper, "From Perishable Property to Industrial Preservation: Remaking the Telegraph Pole in the Early 20th-Century U.S."—an exploration of the environmental and material history of a technology that, for the first time, allowed information to outpace human movement.Co-hosted by Hugh Wood and Megan RenoirEdited and produced by Daisy Semmler

This week, PhD candidates Fergus and Caroline are joined by Shane Hamilton, Reader in Strategy, Management and Society at the University of York. They discuss his recent paper, “The Persistence of Glyphosate: Monsanto’s Strategic Maintenance of Roundup, the World’s Most Enduring Herbicide Technology.” The conversation explores the history of Monsanto’s production of glyphosate—better known by its commercial name, Roundup—and examines how the agrochemical company strategically maintained its dominance in the global herbicide market.Hosted by: Fergus Selsdon Games and Caroline Abbott, PhD candidates at Cambridge UniversityEdited by: Daisy Semmler, MPhil Student, and Hugh Wood, PhD Candidate at Cambridge University

This week on the podcast, Dr. Tom Smith,  Affiliated Lecturer and Keasbey Fellow in American Studies at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, examines how Protestant missionaries situated themselves within local Pacific contexts, and American empire more generally. You can read more of Smith's work in the recent publication of his book, Word across the Water: American Protestant Missionaries, Pacific Worlds, and the Making of Imperial Histories (Cornell University Press, 2024).Co-hosted by Hugh Wood and Simon M. Hurst.Edited by Hugh Wood.

Gary Gerstle, the outgoing Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge and author of multiple award winning books including American Crucible, Liberty and Coercion, and, most recently, the Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, joins Fergus and Hugh to discuss his career, major works, the state of the historical profession and the university sphere, and the contemporary political moment. The last episode of this academic year, there will be more to come in October.

Dr. Lila Chambers, research fellow at Gonville and Cauis College, Cambridge, joins Shea Hendry and Hugh Wood to discuss her upcoming book, Liquid Capital: Alcohol and the Rise of Slavery in the British Atlantic,1580-1737. Lila's research traces the intertwined development of political economy, diplomacy, and race in West Africa, the Caribbean, the British Isles, and North America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. We discuss drinking practices amongst colonial elites and the enslaved, ritual oaths, and the power of consumption.

Prof. Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize winning historian, joins Fergus Seldson Games and Hugh Wood to talk about his new work, Illiberal America: A History. Offered as a corrective to Louis Hartz's classic, The Liberal Tradition in America, Prof. Hahn discusses westward expansion, eugenics, and a deep seated but not intractable illiberal current that has emerged in our own times.