I am an American historian who is deeply interested in people, politics, religion, and culture. A native Appalachian and a former US Marine, I earned a BA degree in History from the University of Kentucky and an MA and PhD from the University of Alabama. My wife and I are deeply passionate about locally sourced foods and sustainable foodways, and we are very proud of our homestead here in Knox County.
I love teaching, writing, and the outdoors. I support local, state, and regional historical preservation and oral history projects, serving on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and recently collaborating with historians at the University of Louisville on a multimedia project covering the history of Louisville’s Kentucky Shakespeare. My students have won several awards for oral histories concerned with the people and place of southeastern Kentucky, primarily focusing on the social and cultural costs of coal mining.
A member of the Bulldog family since 2014, my teaching interests are deep and broad. I teach American history from the first colonies through the 21st century, Kentucky and Appalachian history, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the World Wars. American gender history, and religious history fascinates me as well.
My first book The Whigs' America: Middle-Class Political Thought in the Age of Jackson and Clay, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2020, explored the partisan culture of the antebellum Whigs, arguing that the party made famous by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and William Henry Seward drew support from optimistic middle-class Americans seeking achievement, community, and meaning through collaborative effort and self-control in a world growing more and more impersonal. I’m currently working on a second book about Gilded Age Swiss and German immigration to Kentucky. It’s going to be really cool.
