Author Interview--Kevin Waite (West of Slavery) Part 1

Hello H-CivWar readers,

today we start our new multipart video interview series with Kevin Waite. We chat about the book and slavery in the West pre-Civil War.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Kevin Waite via Zoom. We talked about his new book West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire, which was just released by the University of North Carolina Press. The interview is broken up so that you can easily use the material in class.

Kevin Waite is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and an assistant professor of history at Durham University. His writings have also appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Journal of the Civil War Era, and California History.

These videos are also available on this Playlist

We start our conversation with how Kevin got interested in the topic:

We switch to the arguments of the book:

With slavery in the West being such a diverse topic, I asked Kevin to talk about the different forms of slavery in the West:

We close today with how slaves challenge their masters' authority in the West: