Franklin Sammons Assistant Professor of History
Newcomb Hall 211
540-458-8772
fsammons@wlu.edu
Education
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, History, 2021
M.A. University of Georgia, History, 2011
B.A. Sarah Lawrence College, American Studies, 2009
Research
18th and 19th Century North America; Borderlands and Indigenous History, Legal History, Political Economy.
Current Research:
I am revising my book manuscript entitled Yazoo’s Settlement: Finance, Law, and Dispossession in Early America. The book revisits one of the most notorious episodes in the early republic — the Yazoo land sales — to examine how finance and law operated as technologies of settler colonialism that helped transform the Native Southeast into the Cotton Kingdom prior to the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Teaching
History of North America; U.S. History; Native American History, History of Capitalism,
18th and 19th Century North America; Borderlands and Indigenous History, Legal History, Political Economy.
Selected Publications
2012 With Sarah Buonacore, “Adventures on Wall Street: Finance and Industry in American Dime Novels,” Financial History: The Magazine of the Museum of American Finance (Fall 2012)
2011 “Confederate Veteran Organizations,” in John Inscoe, ed., The Civil War in Georgia: A New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011)
Peer-Reviewed
2020 “The Fruit of the Yazoo Compromise: Mississippi Stock and the Panic of 1819,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter 2020): 671-676.
2021 Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic, by Ariel Ron, Business History Review, Vol. 95, No.2 (2021): 346-348
2021 Borderland Narratives: Negotiation and Accommodation in North America’s Contested Spaces, edited by Andrew K. Frank and Glenn Crothers, The History Teacher (Forthcoming)
2019 Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty, by William Davenport Mercer, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 2019)
2016 The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860, by Calvin Schermerhorn, Ohio Valley History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Fall 2016).