Department
School
Expertise
Stephen West researches and teaches the history of the United States, with a particular focus on the political and social history of slavery, emancipation, and race from the Civil War era through the early twentieth century. He is currently at work on a book about the place of the Fifteenth Amendment in American political culture and memory during the fifty years after its ratification. Prof. West is co-editor of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 3, volume 2, Land and Labor, 1866–1867 (2013), winner of the 2015 Thomas Jefferson Prize for documentary editing from the Society for History in the Federal Government. His first book, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1920 (2008), examined class and political relations among white Southerners in the slave society of the Old South, and their transformation in the wake of slavery’s destruction. Prof. West is also the author of essays about the secession crisis, the historiography of Reconstruction, and urban politics in the post-emancipation South.
Click Selected Publications
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Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation
René Hayden, Anthony E. Kaye, Kate Masur, Steven F. Miller, Susan E. O'Donovan, Leslie S. Rowland, and Stephen A. West, ed., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Series 3, volume 2: Land and Labor, 1866-1867 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)
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From Yeoman to Redneck
Stephen A. West, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850-1915 (University of Virginia Press, 2008)
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