Eric Herschthal | Associate Professor
Eric Herschthal
Associate Professor
CTIHB 315
About
I am a historian of slavery and abolition in the United States. My first book, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (Yale University Press, 2021), explored how scientists and Black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to cast slaveholders as the enemies of modernity. I am currently working on a book about slavery's role in expanding the United States' carbon footprint, tentatively titled Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change in the United States. My research has appeared in academic journals including The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of the Early Republic, and Slavery & Abolition, among others, and has been funded by Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History; Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and The Huntington Library, as well as other institutions. A former journalist, I continue to contribute occasional essays and op-eds to outlet such as The New York Times, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books.
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Ph.D., History, Columbia University
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M.S., Journalism, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism
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B.A., History, Princeton University
19th century U.S. history; slavery and emancipation; African American history; climate history; history of science
Books
2021 The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (Yale University Press)
In progress
Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
2024 “The Plantation Carbon Complex: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change in the Early British Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 81, no. 2 (April 2024): 255-306. Co-authored with John L. Brooke.
2023 “Commodities, Climate, and Carbon” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Commodities History, eds. Jonathan Curry-Machado, Jean Stubbs, William Clarence-Smith, and Jelmer Vos.
2022 “Slavery, Health, and Healing Now: The State of the Field,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 77, no. 1 (January 2022): 1-23.
2021 “What Kind of Abolitionist Was Benjamin Banneker? Reluctant Activism and the Intellectual Lives of Early Black Americans,” Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 4 (Oct. 2021): 669-690.
2021 “Frederick Douglass: Science and Technology” in Frederick Douglass in Context, ed. Michael Roy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 255-66.
2020 “Discovering a Hidden Figure of Service and Leadership: The Reverend Charles Edgar Newsome, MD,” co-authored with: Leon McDougle, Leta Hendricks, Quinn Capers IV, Simone C. Drake. Journal of National Medical Association 112, no. 1 (Feb. 2020): 24-27.
2017 “The Science of Antislavery in the Early Republic: The Case of Dr. Benjamin Rush,” Early American Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 274-307.
2016 “Slaves, Spaniards and Subversion in Early Louisiana: The Persistent Fears of Black Revolt and Spanish Collusion in Territorial Louisiana, 1803-1812,” The Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 283-311.
In progress
“The Factory and The Field: Slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and the Origins of
Climate Change,” in The Long Acceleration: Rethinking the Origins of Human Planetary
Impacts, eds. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Moritz von Brescius (in progress)
“Science, Slavery, and Settler Colonialism at Yale” in Scientific Instruments as Cultural Artifacts, ed. Paolo Bertucci (Yale University Press, under review)
HIST 1700: American Civilization
HIST 2700: United States to 1877
HIST 2720: American Capitalism
HIST 3730: The Civil War Era
HIST 4860/ETHNC 4860: American Slavery
HIST 7500 Proseminar: U.S. History to 1877
HIST 7650: Slavery in the Atlantic World
2025-26 University of Utah, College of Science, Wilkes Center for Climate Science
& Policy
Faculty Research Grant, Book Project: “Carbon Conscripts”
Forest History Society’s 2025 Theodore C. Blegen Award
Best Article in Forest Conservation History, for “The Plantation Carbon Complex,”
The William & Mary Quarterly
2024-25 Harvard University, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History
Visiting Faculty Fellowship, academic year. Book Project: “Carbon Conscripts”
Harvard University, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research
Visiting Faculty Fellowship, academic year (declined). Book Project: “Carbon Conscripts”
University of Utah, ESRR Environmental History Research Grant
Faculty Research Grant, $5,000. Book Project: “Carbon Conscripts”
2023-24 Yale University, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance,
and Abolition
Faculty Research Fellowship, one month. Book Project: “Carbon Conscripts”
The Huntington Library
Faculty Research Fellowship, one month. Book Project: “Carbon Conscripts”
Library Company of Philadelphia
Faculty Research Fellowship, one month. Book Project: “Carbon Conscripts”
National Center for the Humanities
Faculty Research Fellowship, one month. Book Project: “Carbon Conscripts
University of Utah, Tanner Humanities Center
Faculty Fellowship, one-semester research leave. Book Project: “Carbon Conscripts”