Professor Adam Rothman

Adam Rothman, Professor, History

Professor Rothman is an expert in the history of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, and in the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. 

He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Atlantic history, 19th century U.S history, and the history of slavery. 

His most recent book is Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery, published by Harvard University Press in February 2015. This book tells the story of three slave children who were taken from New Orleans to Cuba by their owner during the U.S. Civil War, and their mother’s effort to recover them. 

Beyond Freedom’s Reach has been named a Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and it has received the Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum, and the Margaret T. Lane/Virginia F. Saunders Memorial Research Award from the Government Documents Roundtable of the American Library Association. 

Professor Rothman’s first book, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South, was published by Harvard University Press in 2005. 

In 2007, he co-authored “Major Problems in Atlantic History” (Houghton Mifflin) with his colleague Alison Games.

Professor Rothman is a member of Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. You can read more about Georgetown’s Working Group here.

He is also the principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive, a project of the Working Group. You can visit the Archive here.

He is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer. For more information about Professor Rothman’s lectures click here.

You can follow Professor Rothman on Twitter at @arothmanhistory.