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John Majewski

Current Courses

Winter 2010 (tentative)

  • History 17B
    The American People (Sectional Crisis through Progressivism)

Department Fields

Announcements

There are no announcements

Current Graduate Students

U.S. Sectionalism and Civil War


Professor, Department Chair
Ph.D., University of California Los Angeles, 1994

Office: HSSB 4220 Fall 2009 Hours: By appointment
Fax: (805) 893-8795
Email: majewski@history.ucsb.edu

I focus on the political economy of the Civil War era, with particular interests the origins of capitalism (top down or bottom up?), the relationship between capitalism and democracy, and the economic underpinnings of the Civil War. I use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, but my work is far less technically sophisticated than what commonly appears in places such as the JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY. Labels such as "policy history" or "political economy"--as opposed to economic history-- best describe my work. I am increasingly interested in questions of nationalism, which I believe that scholars studying political economy do not analyze enough.

Research and Teaching Interests

  • U. S. Civil War and Reconstruction
  • U. S. Early Republic
  • Economic History
  • Political and Social History
  • Enviornmental History (see my "shifting cultivation" papers below)

Current Projects

  • Comparing Corporate Chartering in Great Britain and the United States
    I'm writing a paper with Dan Bogart (economics, UC Irvine) on this topic.
  • Comparing the Economic Imagination of the American Revolution and Confederate Secessionists
    A follow-up to Modernizing a Slave Economy, I've presented this paper in several venues and will give a revised version at the 2009 SHA conference.
  • The Diffusion of Libraries in the Early U.S.
    In the very, very formative stages.

Selected Publications

  • Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation
    UNC Press, Forthcoming, May 2009
  • A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War
    New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Shifting Cultivation, Slavery, and Economic Development." Co-authored with Viken Tchakerian.
    Agricultural History 81 (Fall 2007)
  • "Toward a Social History of the Corporation: Shareholding in Pennsylvania, 1800-1840,"
    in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions edited by Cathy Matson (University of Pennsylvania, 2006).
  • Markets and Manufacturing: Industry and Agriculture in the Antebellum South and Midwest" Co-authored with Viken Tchakerian.
    in Susana Delfino and Michele Gillespie (eds.), Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (University of Missouri Press, 2005).
  • “Imagining ‘A Great Manufacturing Empire’: Virginia and the Possibilities of a Confederate Tariff, Co-authored wtih Jay Carlander.
    Civil War History 49 (December 2003): 334-352.

Undergraduate and Graduate Courses

  • History 17B
  • History 162 (U. S. Early Republic)
  • History 164 (U. S. Civil War)