Essays & Articles

Journal of Social History 54.3 (Spring 2021)

This essay pioneers my methodology for a new critical approach to the study of plantation names in early America. It uses the radically underutilized evidence of tract names in Maryland to explore how definitions of the plantation changed on the ground, and the way that definition shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to the places they called plantations reveal how they perceived the plantation and the political, economic, and social relations it structured. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 named tracts of land patented in four Maryland counties between 1634 and 1750, this essay charts the changing popularity of distinct elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, affects of the landowner, and European place-names. It reveals there was no straightforward rush to carve up the land into privatized commercial units. Instead, individuals initially structured plantations around communal frameworks defined variously by manorialism, urban civic traditions, and shared geographic lexicons. As the tobacco economy consolidated into the hands of a slave-owning class, plantation names reframed places as subjective manifestations of planter identities. These conclusions adjust our understanding of the transition to capitalism and slavery in Maryland and they also offer a blueprint for a broader toponymy of the plantation in the Atlantic world.

William and Mary Quarterly 71:3 (July 2014): 361-400

From 1704 to 1708, conspiracy rumors swirled around Maryland politics. Maryland governor John Seymour repeatedly accused Richard Clarke, a member of a respected planter family, of piracy, forgery, arson, and rebellion, yet Clarke managed to evade capture. The fears and resentments that Clarke's troubles expose all had one thing in common—their focus on the newly established capital city of Annapolis. Clarke's desperate intrigues reveal the ways in which Annapolis was reshaping social, political, and economic power around its plantation hinterland.

in Virginia 1619: Slavery & Freedom in the Making of English America (UNC Press, 2019)

The year 1619 is famous for multiple events that reshaped colonial Virginia. These watershed moments have received a huge amount of scholarly attention. But one critical transformation - the decision to begin granting private land to planters - has been seen as an obvious and uncontroversial step. This could hardly be any further from the truth. The issue of how land would be distributed and owned by colonists raised fundamental questions about the balance between private profit and the public good; in 1619 Virginia was in the midst of a bitter debate over how English settlers would create property in America. It was during this debate that they groped their way toward a vision of the “plantation” as a private commercial enterprise.

Early American Studies 15.3 (Fall 2017)

The Virginia port of Norfolk was one of the few towns in early America to be formally incorporated as an independent borough in the colonial period, and it turns out that this anomaly can tell us much about the attitudes and anxieties of Virginia’s slave-owning planter elite.

Atlantic Studies 8.3 (September 2011): 279-99

Nathaniel Bacon’s dramatic 1676 rebellion in Virginia is well known to any student of colonial American history, but it was also a source of horror and fascination to contemporaries in England. Just a few years after the rebellion, the popular court playwright Aphra Behn penned a tragic play loosely based on the events of the rebellion, entitled The Widow Ranter, or The History of Bacon in Virginia. Surprisingly, though, for those familiar with a story of Bacon’s Rebellion that focuses on the colony’s dispersed plantations and frontier character, Behn chose to focus her play on Bacon’s dramatic decision to burn the colonial capital city, Jamestown. The fact that she made this choice can tell us much about the critical and unstable place of cities and towns within the English empire in the late seventeenth century.

in Beck, Krampl, and Retaillaud-Bajac, ed. Les Cinq Sens de la Ville: Du Moyen Âge à Nos Jours (Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2013)

Building towns and cities was a critical part of the way Europeans claimed and justified their control over colonial spaces in the Americas. Historians are accustomed to studying the layout of these places as markers of imperial ambitions and colonial culture. But cities and towns were much more than just abstract visual artifacts - they were lived spaces, full of odors, tastes, and sounds. How were these other sensory elements of urban life actively manipulated in the service of the imperial and colonial project? This essay explores the early development of Williamsburg, Va. and traces the way that its urban sensory landscape was a subject of imperial attention and debate.