Brian Luskey

Antebellum and Civil War Era United States, Social and Cultural History, History of Capitalism

Teaching Fields

Degrees

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

Research Interests

Dr. Luskey’s published work has contributed to the study of capitalism’s history in the United States during the antebellum and Civil War eras. His scholarship has focused on Americans “in the middle,” a phrase that evokes 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, 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 and about capitalist transformation as a whole.

Dr. Luskey is currently working on numerous projects about Civil War Era popular culture, Union soldiers’ economies, Civil War detectives, and Abraham Lincoln.

Courses Offered

• HIST 152: Early American History to 1865
• HIST 257: The Rise and Fall of the U. S. Republic
• HIST 358/558: P. T. Barnum’s America
• HIST 375: The Civil War on Film
• HIST 453: Civil War and Reconstruction
• HIST 454: The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln
• HIST 484: Historical Research Capstone
• HIST 757: Graduate Readings in US History, 1776-1876
• HIST 758: Graduate Research Seminar in US History, 1776-1876

Graduate Students

• Emily Jumba
  
• Rachael Nicholas
• 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.