Assistant Professor of History

(Humanities and Information Scholar, Spring 2027)

The Making of a Free State tells the story of how African chattel slavery and other forms of servitude in a frontier region that later became southwestern Pennsylvania influenced Pennsylvania’s identity as a free state. This study argues that by investigating how African Americans understood free labor and free soil in this region, we can see what a free state meant to them. African Americans articulated and sought to execute a free labor and free-soil vision in county courthouses, the streets of cities and towns, within their homes, worksites, and other intimate and public spaces. In some cases, these ideas became the inspiration for how they imagined the post-emancipation North, emigration projects within and outside the United States, and Reconstruction in both the North and South. The actions that African Americans took in defense of their vision of free soil and free labor in this part of Pennsylvania forced whites throughout the region, state, and beyond to grapple with what it meant to be a free state. By exploring the efforts that Black southwestern Pennsylvanians took to advance a more racially inclusive vision of a free state, this study makes several major contributions to the scholarship on slavery and abolition, the concept of the “free state,” and the lived experiences of Black people in southwestern Pennsylvania and in the larger context of the North.