Adam Rothman
Biographic Data
| ID | 258718 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adam Rothman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adam |
| FAMILY NAME | Rothman |
| SIGNATURE | ROTHMAN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0026-6701 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Slip the Yoke and Change the Joke
From Sea to Shining Sea
Journal Article From Sea to Shining Sea? Get access Kevin Waite. West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 392 pp. $29.95 (paperback). Adam Rothman Adam Rothman [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, dhad045, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhad045 Published: 06 July 2023
Les universités états-uniennes et les réparations liées à l’esclavage
Précédé d’un court chapeau introductif, l’entretien avec Adam Rothman, professeur d’histoire à l’université de Georgetown, à Washington, D.C., retrace le processus entamé par l’université afin d’explorer les liens de l’institution avec l’esclavage et d’envisager les formes de réparations possibles
The Men of Mobtown
Reviewed by: The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation by Adam Malka Adam Rothman (bio) The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation. By Adam Malka. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 352. Cloth, $39.95.) "The whole sentiment of Baltimore was murderous," recalls Frederick Douglass in his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom. He had been brutally attac…
How Do Academic Institutions Evaluate Their History
These remarks, shared at the “Legacy and Mission: Theological Education and the History of Slavery” conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, provide an overview of how Georgetown University is addressing its history with slavery and its afterlives
The Jesuits and Slavery
Despite extensive historiography, most people are not aware that the Society of Jesus owned people. Even Jesuit historiography sometimes neglects that complicated history. The historiography of slavery, however, has long tapped into Jesuit sources and produced a rich scholarship on Jesuit debates over slavery and their slaveholding practices across the Americas. This essay places Jesuit slaveholding in the context of the Jesuits’ global history a…
Daina Ramey Berry. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh
John Hill was about to be sold on the auction block on New Year’s Day in Richmond, Virginia, in 1853 when he broke free from his captors and escaped, making his way to Canada nine months later. Once free to speak his mind, Hill wrote letters back to William Still, the conductor of the Underground Railroad through Philadelphia, that raged against his enslavers: “If my master had allowed me to have an education I would make them American Slave-hold…
Slavery and institutional morality at Georgetown University
The Domestication of the Slave Trade in the United States
Institutional Slavery
In 1718, the Virginia General Assembly granted £1,000 to the College of William and Mary to provide scholarships to students. The College used the money to purchase land on Nottoway River and seventeen slaves, whose labor would fund the education of free white men through the colonial period. As Jennifer Oast shows in Institutional Slavery, William and Mary was hardly alone in using slave labor to subsidize its activities. Virginia’s civil societ…
Beyond Freedom's Reach
After Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862, Rose Herera’s owners fled to Havana, taking her three children with them. Adam Rothman tells the story of Herera’s quest to rescue her children from bondage after the war. As the kidnapping case made its way through the courts, it revealed the prospects and limits of justice during Reconstruction.
The life and death of Gus Reed
The life and death of Gus Reed: a story of race and justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction." Slavery & Abolition, 36(4), pp. 753–754
Louisiana
Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World is one book that should not be judged by its cover, a late seventeenth-century map of America and the Caribbean that depicts lower Louisiana as blank spa
Lawrence N. Powell. The Accidental City
Journal Article Lawrence N. Powell. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Get access Lawrence N. Powell. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. 422. $29.95. Adam Rothman Adam Rothman Georgetown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 4, October 2013, Page 1175, https://doi.org/10.1093/a…
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, and the Proslavery Worldview
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, and the Proslavery Worldview* Adam Rothman (bio) "My father, who . . . was the kindest of masters," wrote the Virginia-born abolitionist Moncure Conway, "had no idea that any slave of his desired freedom." In fact, early in the War of the Rebellion, the elder Conway had predicted: "The Northerners will see that these Negroes, instead of going to them, will remain loyally at our side through this ordeal."1 …
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Slave Country
Slavery and National Expansion in the United States
On May 19, 1856, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts rose in the Senate to denounce a bill authorizing the people of the Kansas Territory to form a state government and join the Union. “It is the rape of a virgin Territory,” he proclaimed to a shocked gallery, “compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope…
Black Townsmen
Mariana Dantas’s Black Townsmen offers a meticulous comparative history of the rise of communities of enslaved and free people of African descent in Baltimore and Sabará. It argues that while the precise patterns of economic and social life differed in the two towns, slaves and free people of African descent shaped the urban milieu in both places through their labor. If many enslaved people used their leverage as urban workers to find pathways to…
Lafcadio Hearn in New Orleans and the Caribbean
Cosmopolitan and anti-modern, Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) arrived in New Orleans in 1877 and spent the next thirteen years of his life in Louisiana and the Caribbean, writing newspaper articles, travel essays, and novellas depicting the rich cultural world he experienced there. Hearn's writing during these years constitutes a “tropical” phase of his peripatetic career, which eventually took him to Japan. Hearn's tropical writings connect New Orlea…
Slave Country
Slave Country tells the tragic story of the expansion of slavery in the new United States. In the wake of the American Revolution, slavery gradually disappeared from the northern states and the importation of captive Africans was prohibited. Yet, at the same time, the country's slave population grew, new plantation crops appeared, and several new slave states joined the Union. Adam Rothman explores how slavery flourished in a new nation dedicated…
Hurricane Katrina and the Burdens of History
Almost three months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, a New York Times editorial mourns, “We are about to lose New Orleans.” The city remains crippled. Whole neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. The federal, state, and local governments dither. Basic services are yet to be fully restored. Only a fraction of its residents have returned, and many never will. By the last count, more than a thousand New Orleanians died in…
Slave Country
Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Many important colonists who participated in the American Revolution believed that the war was, as George Washington observed, for the purpose of rescuing America from . . .Slavery.Yet he and his fellow Founding Fathers allowed slavery to exist by enshrining it in the Constitution in the form of the Three-Fifth Compromise.How did Washington and those like him rationalize the legalization of slavery
Sugar, Slavery, and Society
This collection of eight essays offers a variety of approaches to the study of societies involved in sugar production around the world from the seventeenth century to the present. They are united by their attention to the class dynamics embedded in sugar production over time. The essays fall roughly into four categories. Two essays on the literature of sugar plantation societies in the Caribbean and Mascarenes, one by Sada Niang and the other by …
The Domestication of the Slave Trade in the United States
This chapter discusses a dangerous strategy pursued by southern reformers through withdrawal from the international slave trade. They realized that the same principles of humanity, security, and political economy that informed the Anglo-American movement against the international trade might be turned against slavery itself. In order to prevent the movement against the international trade from doubling back against domestic slavery, reformers in …
Slave Country
Slave Country tells the tragic story of the expansion of slavery in the new United States. In the wake of the American Revolution, slavery gradually disappeared from the northern states and the importation of captive Africans was prohibited. Yet, at the same time, the country's slave population grew, new plantation crops appeared, and several new slave states joined the Union. Adam Rothman explores how slavery flourished in a new nation dedicated…
Slave Country
Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Many important colonists who participated in the American Revolution believed that the war was, as George Washington observed, for the purpose of rescuing America from . . .Slavery.Yet he and his fellow Founding Fathers allowed slavery to exist by enshrining it in the Constitution in the form of the Three-Fifth Compromise.How did Washington and those like him rationalize the legalization of slavery
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, and the Proslavery Worldview
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, and the Proslavery Worldview* Adam Rothman (bio) "My father, who . . . was the kindest of masters," wrote the Virginia-born abolitionist Moncure Conway, "had no idea that any slave of his desired freedom." In fact, early in the War of the Rebellion, the elder Conway had predicted: "The Northerners will see that these Negroes, instead of going to them, will remain loyally at our side through this ordeal."1 …
The Jesuits and Slavery
Despite extensive historiography, most people are not aware that the Society of Jesus owned people. Even Jesuit historiography sometimes neglects that complicated history. The historiography of slavery, however, has long tapped into Jesuit sources and produced a rich scholarship on Jesuit debates over slavery and their slaveholding practices across the Americas. This essay places Jesuit slaveholding in the context of the Jesuits’ global history a…
Slavery and National Expansion in the United States
On May 19, 1856, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts rose in the Senate to denounce a bill authorizing the people of the Kansas Territory to form a state government and join the Union. “It is the rape of a virgin Territory,” he proclaimed to a shocked gallery, “compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope…
The Domestication of the Slave Trade in the United States
This chapter discusses a dangerous strategy pursued by southern reformers through withdrawal from the international slave trade. They realized that the same principles of humanity, security, and political economy that informed the Anglo-American movement against the international trade might be turned against slavery itself. In order to prevent the movement against the international trade from doubling back against domestic slavery, reformers in …
The “Slave Power” in the United States, 1783–1865
The Final Victims
With this detailed study of the importation of slaves to North America in the decades following the American Revolution, James A. McMillin tests long-standing assumptions about an enterprise thought to have waned in the wake of the United States' successful revolution against Great Britain. Combing through previously untapped public and private sources, McMillin uncovers data that challenges entrenched beliefs about the slave trade and, as a resu…
Hurricane Katrina and the Burdens of History
Almost three months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, a New York Times editorial mourns, “We are about to lose New Orleans.” The city remains crippled. Whole neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. The federal, state, and local governments dither. Basic services are yet to be fully restored. Only a fraction of its residents have returned, and many never will. By the last count, more than a thousand New Orleanians died in…
Slave Country
Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Many important colonists who participated in the American Revolution believed that the war was, as George Washington observed, for the purpose of rescuing America from . . .Slavery.Yet he and his fellow Founding Fathers allowed slavery to exist by enshrining it in the Constitution in the form of the Three-Fifth Compromise.How did Washington and those like him rationalize the legalization of slavery
Sugar, Slavery, and Society
This collection of eight essays offers a variety of approaches to the study of societies involved in sugar production around the world from the seventeenth century to the present. They are united by their attention to the class dynamics embedded in sugar production over time. The essays fall roughly into four categories. Two essays on the literature of sugar plantation societies in the Caribbean and Mascarenes, one by Sada Niang and the other by …
Slave Country
Slave Country tells the tragic story of the expansion of slavery in the new United States. In the wake of the American Revolution, slavery gradually disappeared from the northern states and the importation of captive Africans was prohibited. Yet, at the same time, the country's slave population grew, new plantation crops appeared, and several new slave states joined the Union. Adam Rothman explores how slavery flourished in a new nation dedicated…
Lafcadio Hearn in New Orleans and the Caribbean
Cosmopolitan and anti-modern, Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) arrived in New Orleans in 1877 and spent the next thirteen years of his life in Louisiana and the Caribbean, writing newspaper articles, travel essays, and novellas depicting the rich cultural world he experienced there. Hearn's writing during these years constitutes a “tropical” phase of his peripatetic career, which eventually took him to Japan. Hearn's tropical writings connect New Orlea…
Slave Country
Slavery and National Expansion in the United States
On May 19, 1856, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts rose in the Senate to denounce a bill authorizing the people of the Kansas Territory to form a state government and join the Union. “It is the rape of a virgin Territory,” he proclaimed to a shocked gallery, “compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope…
Black Townsmen
Mariana Dantas’s Black Townsmen offers a meticulous comparative history of the rise of communities of enslaved and free people of African descent in Baltimore and Sabará. It argues that while the precise patterns of economic and social life differed in the two towns, slaves and free people of African descent shaped the urban milieu in both places through their labor. If many enslaved people used their leverage as urban workers to find pathways to…
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Lawrence N. Powell. The Accidental City
Journal Article Lawrence N. Powell. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Get access Lawrence N. Powell. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. 422. $29.95. Adam Rothman Adam Rothman Georgetown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 4, October 2013, Page 1175, https://doi.org/10.1093/a…
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, and the Proslavery Worldview
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, and the Proslavery Worldview* Adam Rothman (bio) "My father, who . . . was the kindest of masters," wrote the Virginia-born abolitionist Moncure Conway, "had no idea that any slave of his desired freedom." In fact, early in the War of the Rebellion, the elder Conway had predicted: "The Northerners will see that these Negroes, instead of going to them, will remain loyally at our side through this ordeal."1 …
Beyond Freedom's Reach
After Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862, Rose Herera’s owners fled to Havana, taking her three children with them. Adam Rothman tells the story of Herera’s quest to rescue her children from bondage after the war. As the kidnapping case made its way through the courts, it revealed the prospects and limits of justice during Reconstruction.
The life and death of Gus Reed
The life and death of Gus Reed: a story of race and justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction." Slavery & Abolition, 36(4), pp. 753–754
Louisiana
Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World is one book that should not be judged by its cover, a late seventeenth-century map of America and the Caribbean that depicts lower Louisiana as blank spa
Institutional Slavery
In 1718, the Virginia General Assembly granted £1,000 to the College of William and Mary to provide scholarships to students. The College used the money to purchase land on Nottoway River and seventeen slaves, whose labor would fund the education of free white men through the colonial period. As Jennifer Oast shows in Institutional Slavery, William and Mary was hardly alone in using slave labor to subsidize its activities. Virginia’s civil societ…
The Domestication of the Slave Trade in the United States
Daina Ramey Berry. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh
John Hill was about to be sold on the auction block on New Year’s Day in Richmond, Virginia, in 1853 when he broke free from his captors and escaped, making his way to Canada nine months later. Once free to speak his mind, Hill wrote letters back to William Still, the conductor of the Underground Railroad through Philadelphia, that raged against his enslavers: “If my master had allowed me to have an education I would make them American Slave-hold…
Slavery and institutional morality at Georgetown University
The Men of Mobtown
Reviewed by: The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation by Adam Malka Adam Rothman (bio) The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation. By Adam Malka. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 352. Cloth, $39.95.) "The whole sentiment of Baltimore was murderous," recalls Frederick Douglass in his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom. He had been brutally attac…
How Do Academic Institutions Evaluate Their History
These remarks, shared at the “Legacy and Mission: Theological Education and the History of Slavery” conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, provide an overview of how Georgetown University is addressing its history with slavery and its afterlives
The Jesuits and Slavery
Despite extensive historiography, most people are not aware that the Society of Jesus owned people. Even Jesuit historiography sometimes neglects that complicated history. The historiography of slavery, however, has long tapped into Jesuit sources and produced a rich scholarship on Jesuit debates over slavery and their slaveholding practices across the Americas. This essay places Jesuit slaveholding in the context of the Jesuits’ global history a…
Les universités états-uniennes et les réparations liées à l’esclavage
Précédé d’un court chapeau introductif, l’entretien avec Adam Rothman, professeur d’histoire à l’université de Georgetown, à Washington, D.C., retrace le processus entamé par l’université afin d’explorer les liens de l’institution avec l’esclavage et d’envisager les formes de réparations possibles
Political science (19 works) · History (18 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (14 works) · Race, History, and American Society (11 works) · History (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (9 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Art (5 works)