Matthew Karp on Writing Engaged History

Matthew Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its relationship to the nineteenth-century world. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and joined the Princeton faculty in 2013.

The piece we are talking about is The Politics of a Second Gilded Age, published in February 2021 in The Jacobin.

His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard UP, 2016) explores the ways that slavery shaped U.S. foreign relations before the Civil War. Karp is now at work on a book about the emergence of anti-slavery mass politics in the United States, and in particular the radical vision of the Republican Party in the 1850s.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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