(Before you
start reading this post in earnest, please know that it is not as long as it
seems. Thank you.)
There are some
really wonderful legal historians that teach in history departments. So many, in fact, that I hope I am excused
for naming a few with full knowledge that I am overlooking a great many more:
Linda Kerber
(Iowa), Rebecca Scott (Michigan), Laura Kalman (UCSB), Laura Edwards (Duke), Peter
Hoffer (Georgia), Sally Hadden (Western Michigan), Margot Canady (Princeton), Cornelia
Dayton (Connecticut), David Tannenhaus (UNLV), Hendrik Hartog (Princeton),
Elizabeth Dale (Florida), Barbara Welke (Minnesota), Kelly Kennington (Auburn),
David Konig (Washington U.), Michael Les Benedict (Ohio State), David Armitage
(Harvard), Katherine Turk (UNC), Holly Brewer (Maryland), Jane Dailey
(Chicago), Sara MacDougall (John Jay), Kyle Volk (Montana), Rebecca Mclennan
(Berkeley), Maribel Morey (Clemson), Malick Ghachem (MIT), Yvonne Pitts
(Purdue), Linda Przybyszewski, Michael Willrich (Brandeis), Honor Sachs
(Western Carolina), Will Hanley (Florida State), Katrina Jagodinsky (Nebraska),
Andrew Wender Cohen (Syracuse), Kimberly Welch (Vanderbilt), Philip Thai
(Northeastern), Amy Dru Stanley (Chicago), Ken Ledford (Case Western), Elizabeth
Kai Hinton (Harvard), Anne Kornhauser (City College), Ted Steinberg (Case
Western), Rohit De (Yale), Alison Lefkovitz (Rutgers/NJIT), David Bodenhamer
(Indiana-Purdue), Thomas Mackey (Louisville), Andrew Sandoval-Strausz (New
Mexico), Mike Grossberg (Indiana), Robert Palmer (Houston), Saundra Schwartz
(Hawai’i-Manoa), Richard Hamm (SUNY-Albany), Sara Butler (Ohio State), Deborah
Rosen (Lafayette), Charles Zelden (NOVA-Southeastern), Elisa Minoff (South
Florida), Debjani Battacharyya (Drexel), Tim Garrison (Portland State), Chris
Capozzola (MIT), Matthew Sommer (Stanford), Julia Randolph (North Carolina
State), Matthew Crow (Hobart and William Smith), Melanie Newport (Connecticut-Hartford),
James Schmidt (Northern Illinois), Lou Williams (Kansas State), Patricia Minter
(Western Kentucky), Lucy Salyer (New Hampshire), Katherine Unterman (Texas
A&M), Sarah Levine-Gronningsater (Cal Tech), Jen Manion (UMass-Amherst),
Abby Chandler (UMass-Lowell), Kimberly Reilly (Wisconsin-Green Bay), Adam Malka
(SUNY-Buffalo), Devin Pendas (Boston College), Alan Rogers (Boston College), Mark
Carroll (Missouri), Michael Pfeifer (CUNY), Michael Meranze (UCLA), Richard
Ross (Maryland), Shane Landrum (Florida International), Jennifer Mittelstadt
(Rutgers), H. Robert Baker (Georgia State), Lou Williams (Kansas State), Kate
Masur (Northwestern), Joanna Grisinger (Northwestern), Melissa Macauley (Northwestern), Kathleen Brosnan
(Oklahoma), Rena Lauer (Oregon State), Kathlene Baldanza (Penn State), Craig
Hammond (Penn State), Emily Blanck (Rowan), Rebecca Rix (Princeton), Jack
Rakove (Stanford), Susan Hinely (Stony Brook), James Gigantino (Arkansas), Peter
Larson (Central Florida), Victor Bailey (Kansas), Abigail Firey (Kentucky),
Daniel Gargola (Kentucky), Jennifer Nye (UMass-Amherst), Kate Ramsey (Miami),
Anne S. Twitty (Mississippi), Guy Chet (North Texas), Kevin Butterfield
(Oklahoma), Andrew Porwancher (Oklahoma), Kathryn Schumaker (Oklahoma), Randall
McGowen (Oregon), Peter Karsten (Pittsburgh), Christopher Curtis (Armstrong
State), Sam Lebovic (George Mason), Charlotte Walker-Said (John Jay), Timothy
Huebner (Rhodes College), Sarah Milov (Virginia), Kate Brown (Huntington), Erika
Vause (Florida Southern), Alejandro de la Fuente (Harvard), John Wertheimer (Davidson), Michael Schoeppner (Maine-Farmington), Nate Holdren (Drake), Anne O'Donnell (Harvard), Kirt von Daacke (Virginia), Nancy Woloch (Barnard), Katherine Hermes (Central Connecticut), Cedric de Leon (Providence College), Lee B. Wilson (Clemson), Carole Emberton (SUNY-Buffalo), Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford).
Again, I know my
non-scientific methodology (conference programs, google searches, names in my
inbox) has left out lots of people who should be on this list. I’ve probably mangled a few affiliations,
too. I hope commentators and tweeters
use their megaphones to set me straight.
I apologize in advance!
The point of the
preceding list was not to be comprehensive, though. Rather it was in part to give Legal History
Blog readers—a great many of whom reside on law faculties—a sense of the
remarkable depth of legal history in history departments. Yet another reason for going down this road
is to pick up on a thread from my previous post. There I had postulated that legal history did
not always fit comfortably within the confines of history departments. In a book driven field, I personally felt
pressure to push my project about very legal topics—statutes and
administration, for instance—toward topics that had a broader audience within
history departments. But today I’ll try
and mute my narcissism for a moment and think more generally about the seeming
paradox: the breadth of legal history scholarship in history departments and
the persisting uncomfortable fit of legal history within history departments.
First, is there
a problem here at all? For one thing,
history departments only rarely search for legal historians. This year the American Historical Association
Careers site finds only one available position for legal historians—the
Siegenthaler Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University. A decade or so worth of search ads on the
H-Net Job Guide finds thirteen positions within the United States. This discussion is not at all intended to
mimick the incorrect recent argument of Frederick Lovegall and Kenneth Osgoodthat a paucity of searches in political history reflected that field’s long
goodbye. In fact the opposite is true of
both political history and legal history.
As the list above suggests, legal history is booming within history
departments. If someone were to build a
similar list of political historians they would surely come to the same
conclusion about that field. But the
lack of searches for tenure-line legal historians suggests a structural deficit
of interest in hiring faculty who chiefly identify as legal historians.
The sleight of
hand at play in my list is that almost everyone on it was not hired as a legal
historian but rather as a promising historian of an important historical theme
or an epochal, chronological division.
There are, of course, exceptions to this hypothesis, especially in hires
for faculty to serve as pre-law advisors or to run pre-law programs. But by and large legal historians in history
departments wear at least two hats as historians of, say, the early American republic
and as historians of law. It is
undeniable that historians on law faculties perform similar labors as they
juggle black letter teaching and historical research (when the two do not
converge). But a quick glance at the
leading legal history journals and legal history conference programs—the Law& History Review, the AmericanJournal of Legal History, Law &Social Inquiry, the American Society for Legal History—suggests that
despite the fact that legal historians on history and law faculties do double-duty,
fewer of those in history departments choose legal history venues to present
their work. Here then is a second reason
there may be a problem for it is not just university administrators overlooking
legal history for other fields. In fact,
legal historians within history departments are steering themselves elsewhere.
Those seeking
jobs within history departments—who have it tough enough as it is—have long
adjusted to the nominal demand problem in their field by teaching well beyond
legal history. Many simply call
themselves something else. Depending on
what job I was applying for, I was a historian of early America (not so much),
the early republic (yes), the American revolution (sure), the long
nineteenth-century (ok), America in the world (hmmm), and big data (eeek). Joking aside, legal historians on the history
job market learn how to be flexible and how to make their legal history research speak to more widely advertised fields in the market, such as it is
and has been.
Some have also
found that their work speaks to contemporary concerns. Carceral state scholars are a case in point. Jen Manion, whose Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America is one of my
favorite recent books, taught at Connecticut College and now is in the history
department at Amherst College. Melanie Newport, who is working on a book
about the jail crisis in twentieth-century Cook County, Illinois, now teaches
at the University of Connecticut-Hartford.
Katherine Unterman, author of the outstanding Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives Across Borders(2015), teaches in the history department at Texas A&M. Elizabeth Kai Hinton teaches at Harvard
University and has written the recently published but already well-received From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime(2016). Julilly Kohler-Hausmann’s Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in
1970s America is much anticipated (slated for 2017). She teaches at Cornell. And as if to underscore my point about this
type of scholarship making waves outside of traditional legal history venues,
essays by Kohler-Hausmann and Hinton on the carceral state were paired in an
issue of the Journal of Urban History(vol. 41, no. 5, 2015).
There are a
great many more scholars within history departments who would not identify as
legal historians but whose work has a great deal to say about law, governance,
and the state. That same issue of the Journal of Urban History features work
by my good friend, Timothy Stewart-Winter of Rutgers-Newark. From the title alone, Stewart-Winter’s
outstanding essay, “The Law and Order Origins of Urban Gay Politics” is of
clear interest to legal historians. But since
Stewart-Winter’s faculty profile lists his interests as “sexuality and gender,
political, social, urban, African American,” some may not guess that his recent
book, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Riseof Gay Politics, would also be of interest to legal historians. It most certainly is. A second example is to be found on the other
side of the NY metropolitan region in the work of Stony Brook’s Kathleen
Wilson. In my opinion, Wilson’s 2011
essay in the American Historical Review,
“Re-thinking the Colonial State: Gender and Governmentality in theEighteenth-Century British Empire” is a pathbreaking model for new approaches
to the boundaries of state power in the age of revolution. Yet Wilson’s stated interests on her faculty
page are “modern British cultural and political history.” Of course neither Stewart-Winter nor Wilson need
identify themselves as legal historians.
But legal historians would be wise to explore their work.
But how should
legal historians not-in-the-know find the work of scholars like Stewart-Winter
or Wilson who may describe themselves as something else? Herein lies the challenge and the potential
danger of history departments with limited lines for ‘legal historians.’ It is
admittedly very difficult for already overworked scholars to read even more
journals and keep abreast of multiple historiographies.
Yet I am bullish
nonetheless. Social media, much-maligned
for elevating cat GIFs to an art form, has also succeeded in becoming a
wonderful platform for historians to learn of works in fields that they may not
consider their own. Twitter, where I do
spend a great deal of time kvetching about my sports teams, was also where I
learned about that above referenced issue of the Journal of Urban History, as well as works by Debjani Battacharyya
and Emily Blanck, among many others.
Blanck’s work was also serialized in Slate wherein it was shared several
hundred times on Facebook. The Atlantic Monthly, perhaps due to the
guidance of social and cultural historian Yoni Applebaum, has also become a
premier venue for legal historians to present their work to new audiences. A second source of optimism lies in the
incredible strength of legal history within law faculties. Because it is almost impossible to be a legal
historian in a law school without a doctorate in history, law school legal
historians—especially graduates within the past decade plus—quite rightly see
their work in dialogue with their history department counterparts. Here’s one example: our own Karen Tani’s States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, andAmerican Governance, 1935-1972 (2016), who LHB readers will know teaches in
a law school and has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, clearly
curries a scholarly conversation with University of Vermont historian Felicia
Kornbluh’s great book, The Battle for
Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (2007). Likewise, University of New Hampshire
historian Eliga Gould’s Among the Powersof the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire
interlocutes with the work of NYU Law School legal historian Daniel Hulsebosch
as well as Hulsebosch’s more recent collaboration with his colleague DanielGolove.
In short, the
conversation is already happening. I
believe it will only continue to grow. So
much for the present, then. And since my
first two posts dredged up the past, I’ll devote my next and final post to
talking a little about the future and my next project. As always I look forward to your feedback.
