My new research concentrates on the gendered nature of international politics and law. I find it fascinating that in 1915 during the First World War, over a thousand women met at The Hague to find ways to end the war. At a time when women were not seen as creditable political actors, female peace activists sought to find ways towards a sustainable peace.

Books

Faith in Empire: Politics at the Heart of the Religious Mission, 1790-1840.  (in progress)

Journal Articles

"'Like Barnabus and Saul': A Malagasy Converts in Britain 1839-1841," Journal of Religious History, 38/4 (2014).

"Recruitment and Service of Māori Soldiers in World War One," Itinerario 38/3 (2014).  

‘“Mother Seacole”:  Victorian Domesticity on the Battlefields of the Crimean War,’ Minerva: Journal on Women and War  n.s. 1/2 (Fall 2007): 7-21.

Book Reviews

Beth Newman, Subjects on Display.  Journal of British Studies, 44 (2006).  

Gwyn Campbell, History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750-1895:  The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire.  Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 6 (2005).

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My early scholarly interests focused on the social and cultural history of southern Appalachia.  How did stereotypes of the mountaineers develop?  I try to provide an answer in my book, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains (1997).  Although I continue to keep my fingers in that intellectual pie, the broad range of courses I teach at Juniata has led me to research and write about topics as different as Indian-white relations in colonial Pennsylvania and the role of music in the modern Civil Rights Movement. 

My current research combines my scholarly and teaching interests in environmental history and in the American Revolution.  I hope my current book project, Grounding the American Revolution: An Environmental History of the War of Independence, will give those interested in the Revolution a richer understanding of the war by highlighting the interactions between humans and the natural environment, and those interested in U.S. environmental history a sense of how the Revolutionary period helps to explain subsequent American attitudes towards the environment. 

So far, I have looked at topics such as giant American white pine trees that the Royal Navy used as masts on its largest ships; at supplies of food, hay, and wood during the war’s first year; at battlefields that have remaining in their soil many tons of lead in the form of musket balls; and at America’s unsuccessful efforts to produce saltpetre, the main ingredient in gunpowder.  Using the actual instructions that newspapers and the Continental Congress published for making saltpetre, I will work with Juniata College Chemistry students to create and test a variety of samples.  We will make the gunpowder, fire balls from replica muskets at ballistic gel, and see which samples would have best served the Continental Army in 1775.

In the not-too-distant future, I would also like to tackle a number of other topics: race relations in the Alaskan town of Skagway during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898; the role of the coyote in American history and culture; and an environmental interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement.

Books

• A Mountaineer in Motion: The Memoir of Dr. Abraham Jobe, 1817-1906 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009).
• Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997). [Winner of the Appalachian Studies Award for Best Original Manuscript, from the Appalachian Studies Association and The University Press of Kentucky, 1996]

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Environmental History and the War of Independence: Saltpetre and the Continental Army’s Shortage of Gunpowder,” in The American Revolution Reborn, Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
• “Mast Trees, the British Navy, and the American Revolution,” in Forest and Environmental History of the British Empire/Commonwealth, Vinita Damodaran and Rohan Dsouza, eds. (Delhi, India: Primus Books, forthcoming).              
• “The Rich Diversity of the Edge,” Common-Place, 14:3 (Spring 2014), www.common-place.org
• Guest co-editor with Allen Dieterich-Ward, “Environmental Histories of the Mid-Atlantic,” special issue of Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 79/4 (Autumn 2012).
• "Food, Fuel, and the New England Environment in the War for Independence, 1775-1776," The New England Quarterly, 80/4 (December 2007): 614-654. [Winner of the Theodore C. Blegen Award from the Forest History Society, for the best article in forest and conservation history during 2007]
• "Freedom Songs and the Modern Civil Rights Movement," OAH Magazine of History, 19/4 (July 2005): 23-26.
• "Stereotypes," in High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place, Tyler Blethen and Richard Straw, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004): 101-113.
• "Real Work, Not Busy Work, Part II: The Primary Source Paper," Teaching History, 29:1 (Spring 2004): 36-40.
• "Real Work, Not Busy Work: The Place Paper," Teaching History, 28:2 (Fall 2003): 92-96.
• "Death on the Juniata: Delawares, Iroquois, and Pennsylvanians in a Colonial Whodunit," Pennsylvania History, 65/4 (Autumn 1998): 445-477.
• "'Seeing' Early Appalachian Communities Through the Lenses of History, Geography, and Sociology," in David Colin Crass, Steven D. Smith, Martha A. Zierden, and Richard D. Brooks, eds.The Southern Colonial Backcountry: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Frontier Communities (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 162-181.
• “Geographic Determinism and Possibilism: Interpretations of the Appalachian Environment and Culture in the Last Century,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association, 4 (1992): 14-23.

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I have long been interested in the legal history of Europe before 1100. I am fascinated by how people solve their problems when they have limited access to law courts, procedure and precedent. I also like the history of the ordinary and everyday -- the things that are hard to find in primary sources, because they are too commonplace. Most recently I have begun research into medical questions as well as legal ones, and I am working on a book-length study of breast diseases in history.

Books

• Daily Life of Women in Medieval Europe. Greenwood Press, 2022.

• Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D. White. Editor, with Tracey L. Billado. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010.

Articles and Book Chapters

• "Age and Gender,” in the Middle Ages volume of the new 6-volume Bloomsbury series, A Cultural History of Death, ed. Ashby Kinch (forthcoming Bloomsbury 2024).
• “Care of the Breast in the Late Middle Ages: the Tractatus de passionibus mammillarum,” in Sharon Strocchia and Sara Ritchey, eds., Gendered Histories of Health, Healing and the Body, 1250-1550. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020, 119-137.
• “Correcting the ‘Unnatural’ Breast: Gynecomastia and Gender in Medieval Medicine,” in special edition of Medicina nei secoli, ed. Helen Perdicoyianni-Paleologou, 33/1 (2021): 3-30.
• "The Necessitas naturae and Monastic Hygiene,” in Albrecht Classen, ed., Hygiene, Medicine, and Well-Being in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Periods. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2017, 129-147.
• “Power and Trauma in the ‘Maid of Arras,’ Cantigas de Santa Maria 105,” in Wendy Turner and Christina Lee, eds., Trauma in Medieval Society. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2018, 105-121.
• “Lactation and Breast Diseases in Antiquity: Medical Authorities on Breast Health and Treatment,” in special issue “Women and Womanhood in the Middle Ages,” ed. Piotr Górecki, Quaestiones Medii Aevi Novae 19 (2014): 103-38.
• “Fashion and Benefaction in Twelfth-Century Western France,” in Emilia Jamroziak and Janet Burton, eds., Religious and Laity in Northern Europe 1000-1400: Interaction, Negotiation and Power. Turnhout, BE: Brepols, 2006, 41-62.
• “Who was Lady Constance of Angers? Nuns as poets and correspondents at the monastery of Ronceray d’Angers in the early twelfth century,” Medieval Perspectives 19 (2004): 255-268.
• “Women and Ordeals,” in Warren C. Brown and Piotr Górecki, eds., Conflict in Medieval Europe. London: Ashgate, 2003, 163-174.
• "Politics, Holiness and Property in Angers, 1080-1130," French Historical Studies 24:4 (Fall 2001): 601-618.
• "Convents," in The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, ed. Eva Sartori. New York: Greenwood Press, 1999, 125-126.
• "Disputing Corpses: Le Ronceray d'Angers versus Saint-Nicolas d'Angers, 1080-1145." Medieval Perspectives 10 (1995): 178-188.

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Books

• Lowcountry Time and Tide: The Collapse of The Rice Kingdom. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Hilton Head Island” in American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition, eds. Nicholas Bloom and J. Mark Souther. Chicago: Columbia College Chicago Press, 2012.
• “A Remarkable Case: A Surgeon’s Letter to the Huntingdon Globe” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 135.4 (October 2011): pp. 558-560.
• “’Don’t Want to see no more… like that:’ Climate Change as a Factor in the Collapse of Lowcountry Rice Culture, 1893-1920,” in Historical Climate Variability and Impacts in North America, eds. Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux and Cary Mock.  London: Springer, 2009.
• “Liquid Assets: Madeira Wine and Cultural Capital among the Lowcountry Planters, 1735-1900,” American Nineteenth Century History 6.2 (June 2005): pp. 173-188.
• Regulating the Poor in Alabama: The Jefferson County Poor Farm, 1885-1945,” in Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830-1930, ed. Elna C. Green. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999, 40-60.
• Editorial: “In Defense of Fantasy Football.” Providence Journal, Providence RI, September 4, 2005.
• Editorial: “Leadership Not Beauty Pageant.” Altoona Mirror, Altoona PA, July 18, 2004, A8.
• Editorial: “Strom Thurmond’s Long Racist Legacy.” Providence Journal, Providence R.I., July 16, 2003.
• Encyclopedia entries contributed to: Encyclopedia of African American History, 2006; Encyclopedia of South Carolina, 2006; Encyclopedia of Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2005; Dictionary of American History, 2002; Dictionary of American National Biography, Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Founder and editor of H-SC, the Humanities Net list-serve for South Carolina.