Author Interview--Kevin Waite (West of Slavery) Part 6

Hello H-CivWar readers,

today we continue our multipart video interview series with Kevin Waite. We chat about the convict-lease system, New Mexico statehood, and interestingly Civil War Monuments in California. The series will conclude next week with a look at Civil War West scholarship.

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 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 about whether Southerners may have learned about convict-lease systems in the West and transplanted it South:

We turn to memory and how you have Confederate Monuments in California:

We briefly talk about New Mexico and whether there was a conversation about statehood during the Civil War era:

We close this week with a look at Kevin's future projects ideas: