Stan talks about This Week in History (the Stamp Act, James Jackson, Spike Lee, the first Black graduate of West Point, the Masters, Tomochichi, & Houdini), says goodbye to a pathbreaking historian and actor, spotlights new additions to the Off the Deaton Path bookshelf, and welcomes the opening of Major League Baseball.
In this Dispatch, Dr. Deaton discusses the case of an enslaved man, Dred Scott, whose pursuit of freedom went all the way to the Supreme Court–and helped cause the Civil War.
Fifty years ago this week, on March 5, 1971, historian Allan Nevins died in Menlo Park, California, at the age of 80. Nevins was one of the most influential and prolific historians ever, the author of so many books, articles, essays, and reviews, that no one really knows exactly how prolific he was. He is best remembered now as the author of the 8-volume work known collectively as Ordeal of the Union, a history of the United States from 1847 through 1865, covering the period from the end of the Mexican War through Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
Dr. Deaton looks at the life of Alexander Stephens, one of two Georgians memorialized in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol in Washington DC, the Vice President of the Confederacy and the author of the infamous “Cornerstone” speech.
Drew Swanson is Professor of History at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where he teaches classes in environmental history, food, 19th-century America, and public history. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Georgia in 2010. Born in rural Virginia, he worked as a farmer, zookeeper, and natural resource manager before turning to academia. Dr. Swanson’s research examines the intersections of nature and culture in the American South. He is the author of three books: Beyond the Mountains: Commodifying Appalachian Environments (University of Georgia Press, 2018); A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South (Yale University Press, 2014); and Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape (University of Georgia Press, 2012), which won the Georgia Historical Society’s Malcolm Bell, Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award for the best book in Georgia history in 2013. Dr. Swanson also won the inaugural John C. Inscoe Award in 2017 for the best article published in the Georgia Historical Quarterly the previous year. He currently serves on the GHQ Board of Editors.