Brian Luskey

Teaching Fields

• Civil War and Reconstruction 

• Social and Cultural History 

• Nineteenth-Century America
  

Degrees

• Ph.D. Emory University, 2004
• M.A. Emory University, 2000
• A.B., Davidson College, 1997

Research Interests

Dr. Luskey studies the social and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States, and has taught many courses that explore that history—from undergraduate classes that focus on Abraham Lincoln and P. T. Barnum to graduate seminars that examine the historiographical state of the field. Dr. Luskey’s scholarship has focused on Americans “in the middle,” a phrase meant to evoke both fluid notions of social position and identity as well as the emergence of a variety of brokers and middlemen who rose to prominence in the economy during this period. His subjects—clerks, employment agents, soldiers, housewives, and slave traders among them—negotiated the commercializing and industrializing economy’s promise and peril, defined who they were through the process of market making and engagement, and sparked debates about the cultural meanings of their economic practices.

Dr. Luskey is now doing research in the voluminous archive produced by U. S. War Department operative Lafayette C. Baker during the Civil War. He is interested in how Baker’s detective work and the archive he assembled helped him envision and police a criminal underworld during the war. Dr. Luskey also hopes to use these letters, affidavits, and reports to tell captivating detective stories about ordinary Americans caught up in Baker’s dragnet.

Courses Offered

Graduate Students

• Emily Jumba
  
• Rachael Nicholas
• Matthew Titolo 
  
• Montana Williamson

Publications

Books

Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America, (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).  https://uncpress.org/book/9781469654324/men-is-cheap/

Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America, co-edited with Wendy A. Woloson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).   https://www.pennpress.org/9780812246896/capitalism-by-gaslight/

On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York University Press, 2010).  https://nyupress.org/9780814753101/on-the-make/

Journal Articles, Book Chapters, and Essays

“The Union’s Culture Industry,”  Journal of the Civil War Era 14, no. 2 (June 2024): 225-248.

“Economic Value and Social Values in the Civil War,” in Cambridge History of the American Civil War, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Cambridge University Press, 2019) 3: 91-108.

“Muster: Inspecting Material Cultures of the Civil War,” Civil War History 63, no. 2 (June 2017): 102-110 (introduction co-authored and issue co-edited with Jason Phillips).

“Houses Divided: The Cultural Economy of Emancipation in the Civil War North,” Journal of the Early Republic 36 (Winter 2016): 637-657.

“Chasing Capital in Hard Times: Monroe Edwards, Slavery, and Sovereignty in the Panicked Atlantic,” Early American Studies 14 (Winter 2016): 82-113.

“Men Is Cheap,”  Disunion  (Blog of the New York Times), February 4, 2015.

“Special Marts: Intelligence Offices, Labor Commodification, and Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century America,”  Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (September 2013): 360-391.

“The Ambiguities of Class in Antebellum America,” in Sean P. Adams, ed.,  A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson (Blackwell Publishing, 2013): 194-212

“Dishonest Clerks and the Culture of Capitalism: What’s Old Is New Again,” Ask the Author Roundtable, Common-place  (July 2010).

“Jumping Counters in White Collars: Manliness, Respectability, and Work in the Antebellum City,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (Summer 2006): 173-219.

“What Is My Prospects?: The Contours of Mercantile Apprenticeship, Ambition, and Advancement in the Early American Economy,”  Business History Review 78 (Winter 2004): 665-702. (Winner of the 2004 Newcomen-Harvard Special Award in Business History).

“Riot and Respectability: The Shifting Terrain of Class Language and Status in Baltimore during the Great Strike of 1877,”  American Nineteenth Century History 4 (Fall 2003): 61-96.