Author Interview--Kevin Waite (West of Slavery) Part 4

Hello H-CivWar readers,

today we continue our multipart video interview series with Kevin Waite. We chat about the lead up to secession with Bleeding Kansas and the Mormon War as well as the reminder that there were secession movements in the Southwest.

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 a loaded question about guns in California in the 1850s and political violence:

We continue with Kevin's interesting comparison of Bleeding Kansas and the Mountain Meadows Massacre:

We turn our attention to the secession movements in 1861 and how Colorado (SoCal) and Arizona (Southern NM) tried to secede:

And we close today with my question why have scholars ignored the Southwest's secession and military actions: