ABOUT

I am an educator and historian based in Boston, Massachusetts. Over the past twenty years I have taught a wide range of courses in American history on both the high school and college levels. My teaching career began in Mobile, Alabama in 1998, where I taught philosophy at the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science. In 2000 I began work at the St. Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I taught history and served as the department chair. Since 2011 I have taught history full- and part-time at Gann Academy in Waltham.

My research is focused primarily on the Civil War era with a concentration in Civil War memory. I am the author and editor of three books, including most recently, Searching For Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (2019), Remembering The Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites (2017). I am currently at work on A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, which is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press as well as editing the collected wartime and postwar correspondence of Captain John Christopher Winsmith.

You can find my op-eds in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Daily Beast, Civil War Times, and The Civil War Monitor. My work on the Confederate monument controversy has led to interviews with The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, NPR as well as numerous international newspapers. I have appeared on the Black News Channel, C-SPAN, NPR, Al-Jazeera, BackStory With the American History Guys, and Vox.

Over the years I have worked extensively with teachers and students across the country on how to better understand challenging subjects such as the ongoing controversy surrounding Civil War memory and the Confederate monument controversy. I have collaborated on history education workshops with the National Park Service, Civil War Trust, Organization of American Historians, Ford’s Theatre, John Brown Lives!, The Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, Georgia Historical Society, and Massachusetts Historical Society.

I earned a Bachelor’s Degrees in history and philosophy from William Paterson University in New Jersey as well as a Master’s Degree in philosophy from the University of Maryland at College Park and a Master’s Degree in history from the University of Richmond.