Dr. Paul Polgar is an Adjunct Instructor in History in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi.
Research Interests
- Slavery and Emancipation in the United States, including the first emancipation (Revolutionary/Post-Revolutionary eras), the second emancipation (Civil War/Reconstruction eras), and their aftermaths.
- Abolition and Social Reform, with a focus on organized efforts at challenging/overturning the institution of slavery in the United States.
- Race and Citizenship, particularly the long and ongoing battle over who is included in the U.S. Constitution’s phrase “We the People” and considered members of the body politic.
- Politics and Political Culture, especially the creation and trajectory of political parties, the nature of participatory democracy, and the evolution of major sociopolitical discourses.
- African American History, with an emphasis on the long history of the fight for freedom, equality, and citizenship rights for people of African descent.
Biography
Dr. Polgar has published widely on race, citizenship, and anti-racist activism in the United States. His first book, Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement--a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize--recovers the racially inclusive vision of the United States’ first abolition movement, created by a coalition of Black and white activists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By guarding and expanding the rights of people of African descent and demonstrating that Black Americans could become virtuous citizens of the new nation, these activists, whom Polgar names “first movement abolitionists,” sought to end white prejudice and eliminate racial inequality in the American republic. Professor Polgar is now at work on two projects. His second book project extends his reevaluation of African American rights movements in the early United States by examining anew the emergence in the incipient Reconstruction years of a broad electoral coalition in support of a pathbreaking expansion of Black civil and political rights. An Abolition Peace: Black Rights, the Union Cause, and the Rise of Radical Reconstruction will trace an evolving political culture in the 1860s that braided African American rights with Republican Party identity and the meaning and consequences of the Civil War. Polgar is also the co-editor of Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery (forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press), an edited collection of essays that situates the origins of slavery and race in the U.S. in a broader, comparative context of hemispheric scope.
In support of his scholarship, Professor Polgar has received fellowships and grants from several institutions, including the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the American Antiquarian Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the New-York Historical Society, The Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, among others. At the University of Mississippi, he regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on U.S. history to 1877, American slavery, race, and emancipation, and U.S. historiography through Reconstruction.
Publications
Books:
Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery, edited with Jesse Cromwell and Marc Lerner (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press)
Articles:
“A Clash of Principles: The First Federal Debate Over Slavery and Race,” Federal History, Issue 14 (April 2022): 15-37.
“Race and Belonging in the New American Nation: The Republican Roots of Black Abolitionism,” in Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations, ed. Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018): 143-163.
“‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient': The Politics of Partisanship and Free Black Voting Rights in Early National New York," American Nineteenth Century History, Vol. 12, Issue 1 (March 2011): 1-23.
“‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation': Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship," Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer 2011): 229-258.
“Fighting Lightning with Fire: Black Boston’s Battle against The Birth of a Nation,” Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 10 (2008): 85-114.
Courses Taught
- HST 130 The United States to 1877
- HST 403 Emerging Nation, 1789-1850
- HST 422 The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
- HST490 Slavery, Race, and Freedom in America
- HST 498 Undergraduate Research Seminar in History
- HST 505 Historiography: US Through Reconstruction
- HST 605 First Emancipations: Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic World
Education
Ph.D. History, Cuny New York City Technical College (2013)