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Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) featured as the Editor’s Choice of the New York Times Book Review. The Slave’s Cause has been reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BBC History, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Boston Globe among other newspapers and journals. It was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction and received an Honorable Mention in the US History category of the PROSE awards. It has been awarded the 19^th Annual Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, the Avery Craven prize by the Organization of American Historians for the best book in Civil War history, the best book prize by the Society of Historians of the Early Republic, and the James Rawley prize for the best book on secession and the sectional conflict published in the last two years from the Southern Historical Association. It was also named the book of the week by Times Higher Education in May to coincide with its UK publication and named one of three great History books of 2016 by Stephen Carter in Bloomberg News.

Sinha is a contributing author of The Abolitionist Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2012). She is a co-editor of the two volume African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African Slave Trade to the Twenty First Century (Prentice Hall, 2004) and Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History (Columbia University Press, 2007). She was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty and received the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award in Recognition of Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Advising at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for over twenty years. She is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and was appointed to the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lecture Series. In 2017, she was named one of the top twenty-five women in higher education by the journal Diverse: Issue in Higher Education. Sinha is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including two year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, fellowships from the Charles Warren Center and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, the Howard Foundation fellowship at Brown University, the Rockefeller Post-Doctoral fellowship from the Institute of the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Whiting fellowship from Columbia University. Her research interests lie in early United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She has published numerous articles and lectured widely on these topics.

Sinha is a member of the Council of Advisors for the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library, co-editor of the “Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900,” series of the University of Georgia Press, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Civil War Era and Slavery and Abolition. She has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Time, CNN, The Boston Globe, and The Huffington Post and been interviewed by The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Times of London, The Boston Globe, and Slate. Sinha appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in 2014 and TLC’s Who Do You Think You Are. Her Civil War lecture class was filmed by CSPAN for its Lectures in History series. She was an adviser and on-screen expert for the Emmy nominated PBS documentary, The Abolitionists (2013), which is a part of the NEH funded Created Equal film series. She is currently working on a book on Reconstruction under contract with Basic Books.

Recent Publications

Selected Publications
Books

The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)

Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
Avery O. Craven Award for Best Book on the Civil War Era, Organization of American Historians
Best Book Prize, Society of Historians of the Early American Republic
James A. Rawley Award for the Best Book on Secession and the Sectional Crisis published in the last two years, Southern Historical Association
National Book Award for Non Fiction, Long List
Honorable Mention in the U.S. History category for the American Publishers Awards for Professional & Scholarly Excellence (PROSE)
Co-authored, The Abolitionist Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012)

Co-edited, Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)

Co-edited, African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African Slave Trade to the Twenty First Century Vol. I To 1877 & Vol. II From 1865 to the Present (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2004)

The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)

Finalist, Avery O. Craven Award for Best Book on the Civil War Era, Organization of American Historians
Finalist, George C. Rogers Award for Best Book on South Carolina History
Selected Articles

“History and Its Discontents,” in The Future of History: Historians, Historical Organizations and the Prospects for the Field edited by Conrad Edick Wright and Kate Viens (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2017): 79-88

“Reviving the Black Radical Tradition,” in Race Capitalism Justice Forum 1 Boston Review (Boston, 2017): 66-71

“America’s Rotten Electoral College System,” in Eric Burin ed., Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College System (The Digital Press @ the University of North Dakota, 2017)

“Abraham Lincoln’s Competing Political Loyalties: Union, Constitution, and Antislavery,” in Nicholas Buccola ed., Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2016): 164-191

“The Long and Proud History of Charleston’s AME Church,” in Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain eds., Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016): 69-70

“The Other Francis Ellen Watkins Harper,” Common-place (Spring 2016) Vol. 16 No. 2

“Did He Die an Abolitionist? The Evolution of Abraham Lincoln’s Antislavery,” American Political Thought 4 (Summer 2015): 439-454

“Memory as History, Memory as Activism: The Forgotten Abolitionist Struggle after the Civil War,” commonplace 14 (Winter 2014)

Review Essay, “The Complicated Histories of Emancipation: State of the Field at 150,” Reviews in American History 41 (December 2013): 665-671

“Architects of Their Own Liberation: African Americans, Emancipation and the Civil War,” OAH Magazine of History 27 (April 2013): 1-6

“Historians’ Forum: The Emancipation Proclamation,” Civil War History 59 (March 2013): 7-31

“Did the Abolitionists Cause the Civil War?” in The Abolitionist Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012): 81-108.

“Making Sense of John Brown’s Raid,” in Edward Ayers and Carolyn R. Martin eds., America on the Eve of the Civil War: A Virginia Sesquicentennial Conference (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010): 69-89, 112-120.

”Allies for Emancipation?: Lincoln and Black Abolitionists,” in Eric Foner ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008): 167-196.

“An Alternative Tradition of Radicalism: African American Abolitionists and the Metaphor of Revolution, 1775-1865” in Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History (Columbia University Press, 2007): 9-30

“To ‘Cast Just Obliquy’ on Oppressors: Black Radicalism in the Age of Revolution” William and Mary Quarterly LXIV (January 2007): 149-160

“Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism,” in Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer eds, Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York: New Press, 2006): 23-38

Review Essay “His Truth Is Marching On: John Brown and the Fight for Racial Justice,” in Civil War History 52 (June 2006): 161-169

“Black Abolitionism: The Assault on Southern Slavery and the Struggle for Racial Equality,” in Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris eds., Slavery in New York (New York: New Press, 2005): 239-262

“Eugene D. Genovese: The Mind of a Marxist Conservative,” Radical History Review 88 (Winter 2004): 4-29

“The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2003): 233-262

“Revolution or Counterrevolution? The Political Ideology of Secession in Antebellum South Carolina,” Civil War History Vol. XLVI No. 3 (September, 2000): 205-226

“Judicial Nullification: The South Carolina Led Southern Movement to Reopen the African Slave Trade in the 1850s” in Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Carl Pedersen eds., Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (Oxford University Press, 1999) 127-143

“Louisa Susanna McCord: Spokeswoman of the Master Class in Antebellum South Carolina,” in Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner eds., Feminist Nightmares Women at Odds: Feminism and the Problem of Sisterhood (New York University Press, 1994) 62-87

 

 

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Interviewed by The New York Times, Time, CNN, the Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, Gothamist and Daily Caller,

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Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

17th century, 18th century, 19th century

Expertise by Topic

American Civil War, American Founding Era, Emancipation, Gender, Race, Slavery, Women