Participant Info
- First Name
- Rachel Tamar
- Last Name
- Van
- Country
- United States
- State
- CA
- rtvan@cpp.edu
- Affiliation
- Cal Poly Pomona
- Website URL
- https://www.cpp.edu/faculty/rtvan/index.shtml
- Keywords
- Family history, merchant capitalism, dynastic trusts, Boston, early American diplomatic history, Americans in the Pacific
- Availability
- 1
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Rachel Tamar Van is an Associate Professor of early American history at Cal Poly Pomona and co-director of the Digital Humanities Consortium. She specializes in American merchant capitalism in the late 18th – early 19th centuries with a particular emphasis on gender & family, capitalism, and the politics of Americans in the Pacific. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and did a postdoctoral fellowship through the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Other interests include teaching with games and public information literacy, from Wikipedia to AI.
- Recent Publications
“Connections: Kinship as a Repertoire in the Evolution of Global Capitalism,” in Global Migration History, eds. Andrew Liu, Owen Miller, and Meha Priyadarshini (Columbia University Press, 2026).
“Account Books as Sources and Social Technologies,” Method and Madness Special Issue of Management and Organizational History, 2023.
“China-Oriented: Early American Trade with Asia,” in Tyson Reader, ed. Routledge History of US Foreign Relations (Routledge Press, 2021).
“Cents & Sensibilities: Fairness & Free Trade in the Nineteenth-Century,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 1 (January 2018): 72-89.
“The Opium War (1839-1842)” Dictionary of American History, Supplement: America in the World, 1776 to the Present, ed. Edward J. Blum, 2 vols. (Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2016).
“The ‘Woman Pigeon’: Gender and the Anglo-American Commercial Community in Canton & Macao, 1800-1849,” The Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 4 (Nov. 2014): 561-591.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- United States
- Expertise by Geography
- Pacific, United States
- Expertise by Chronology
- 18th century, 19th century
- Expertise by Topic
- American Revolution, American Founding Era, Capitalism, Children & Youth, Diplomacy, Economic History, Family, Gender, Politics, Urban History, Women
