Emma Teitelman

I am a historian of the United States, with particular interests in the history of labor, inequality, and state formation, especially during Reconstruction and the late-nineteenth century. At McGill, I teach surveys in modern U.S. history (nineteenth and twentieth century) and courses on labor, the U.S. welfare state, and American capitalism.

My first book, Lumber and Lodes: The Social Reconstruction of the South and the West After the U.S. Civil War (forthcoming with Harvard University Press), is a history of capitalist power and worker politics in the wake of emancipation. The U.S. Civil War brought profound changes to the lives of formerly enslaved people. But it also untethered northern elites and the government from the slaveholders who had long obstructed state-led economic development. Moving between New York City, southeastern Georgia, and southern Arizona, Lumber and Lodes examines how northern businessmen, with crucial assistance from federal authorities, invested capital across long distances into raw materials such as lumber and lode mines. The book traces this extractive activity to reveal widespread social transformations, including the dispossession of diverse populations – from newly-freed Black southerners to Indigenous peoples to smallholding farmers and migrant workers – whose experiences are rarely understood in relation to one another. Research for this project has drawn support from the University of Cambridge Mellon Fund, the Huntington Library, and the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. My writing has appeared in the Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, and Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya (Pluto Press, 2017). Prior to joining McGill, I was the Associate Director of the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University.