In this episode, Kate Carpenter interviews historian Dr. Seth Rockman. Seth is a historian at Brown University. His first book was called Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, and he is also the co-editor of the volume Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. He does a great deal of interesting interdisciplinary work on labor history, and he has even been called on to share his research findings on slavery and capitalism with the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. His new book, out now, is called Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery. You’ll love Seth’s responses about how challenging the writing process can be, the joys of archives and the need for deadlines to drag us out of them, and why his dissertation adviser’s advice is always in his ear while he writes.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore
- Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development
- Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
- Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
- Zotero
- Endnote
- re:work Center at ICI Berlin
- Marshfield School of Weaving
- Jenny Erpenbeck, Go Went Gone and Kairos
- Michael Zakim, Accounting for Capitalism and Ready-Made Democracy
- Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross
- Walter Johnson: The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, and Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
- Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery
- Laura F. Edwards, Only the Clothes on Her Back, The People and Their Peace,
- David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence
- Daniel Immerwahr
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