I am a historian of nineteenth-century North America, investigating the cultural and political history of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction and tracing the development of American cities. I focus on the American West and its borderlands – from California to the Yukon Territory, from St. Louis to El Paso – and I place the experience of European settlement in the region into comparative perspective.

Investigating triumphant paintings and urban disasters, university origins and public memorials, my work on the Civil War Era re-narrates the entire era from 1848 to 1877 and in three regions -- West as well as North and South -- through the discovery and analysis of new sources and new locales.

In my work on American cities, I reconstruct how residents made sense of their surroundings by supplementing the written record with material-culture findings and geographic information system (GIS) analysis.

My first book, The Cultural Civil War: St. Louis and the Failures of Manifest Destiny, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in the 2010-2011 school year. I am also co-editing a volume,  Frontier Cities, which considers the origins and structure of European-settled cities in North America and beyond.

Recent publications include an article on the memory of the Dred Scott Case and Dred Scott's family for Common-place; an article about the St. Louis Mercantile Library in the Missouri Historical Review; and the international implications of the Klondike Gold Rush for Anglo-Saxonism, in the Pacific Historical Review.

I aim to write accessible history, and to engage a wide audience, including those outside the academy. To that end, I have written a number of historically-minded op-eds, and I am a contributor to the Making History Podcast.

My new research projects consider the return of African Americans from Canada during and after the Civil War, and investigate which kind of California history is depicted in mosaics designed by Millard Sheets for Home Savings and Loan branches.