About Erin’s Biography and Route to Being a History Professor
I long to live in a world where people are deemed valuable simply because they are human.
I grew up in a small town in Texas. Occasionally a non-white person would move to our town. They never stayed long. In the eighth grade I learned why. A young African-American boy and his family moved to our town. Unlike the other minorities who settled before, his family was wealthy. They lived in the best neighborhood in town. One day on the bus, two of my friends verbally attacked the young boy, who was at most in the fifth grade. The hate that spewed from their mouths disgusted and frightened me. They threatened him with violence. Their physical intimidation stopped short of injury.
After overcoming my initial shock, I yelled at them; leave him alone! I could not understand how people who in one moment could be so charming, endearing even, could in the next be reeling with hate and violence.
I spent the next decade of my life acting as a sort of ambassador, or at least I thought so, living a liminal life. I tried to bridge the gap between one group of friends and another, introducing them, providing space for them to interact where their similarities might overshadow their differences. I hope I experienced some success.
But once I declared history my major in college I began the intellectual and spiritual process of understanding racism. Several books influenced the scaffolding that shaped my academic endeavors. They included Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery American Freedom, Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black, Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, and Jennifer Morgan’s “Some Could Suckle,” as well as Neil Foley’s White Scourge, among others. These arguments inspired me. They puzzled me. They always left me partially convinced. It seemed to me something deeper existed that could only be found now that these and other scholars had dug through the institutional trenches of racism, the hegemonic influences of class, gender, ideology, law, and sex.
Thanks to many long discussions with my advisor Tom Slaughter, I arrived at the perfect temporal and geographic space to investigate my questions about the relationship between the individual, his identity, and racism, 18th century Pennsylvania. I chose Pennsylvania because it is the only place where all of the elements that account for understanding of racism at the time are absent. I asked what happened to William Penn’s ideals of tolerance, egalitarianism, and representative government. I examine key events where people demanded these rights for themselves. As they demanded these rights for themselves they defined themselves and others in increasingly racial terms. They made race from the bottom-up.
I grew up in a small town in Texas. Occasionally a non-white person would move to our town. They never stayed long. In the eighth grade I learned why. A young African-American boy and his family moved to our town. Unlike the other minorities who settled before, his family was wealthy. They lived in the best neighborhood in town. One day on the bus, two of my friends verbally attacked the young boy, who was at most in the fifth grade. The hate that spewed from their mouths disgusted and frightened me. They threatened him with violence. Their physical intimidation stopped short of injury.
After overcoming my initial shock, I yelled at them; leave him alone! I could not understand how people who in one moment could be so charming, endearing even, could in the next be reeling with hate and violence.
I spent the next decade of my life acting as a sort of ambassador, or at least I thought so, living a liminal life. I tried to bridge the gap between one group of friends and another, introducing them, providing space for them to interact where their similarities might overshadow their differences. I hope I experienced some success.
But once I declared history my major in college I began the intellectual and spiritual process of understanding racism. Several books influenced the scaffolding that shaped my academic endeavors. They included Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery American Freedom, Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black, Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, and Jennifer Morgan’s “Some Could Suckle,” as well as Neil Foley’s White Scourge, among others. These arguments inspired me. They puzzled me. They always left me partially convinced. It seemed to me something deeper existed that could only be found now that these and other scholars had dug through the institutional trenches of racism, the hegemonic influences of class, gender, ideology, law, and sex.
Thanks to many long discussions with my advisor Tom Slaughter, I arrived at the perfect temporal and geographic space to investigate my questions about the relationship between the individual, his identity, and racism, 18th century Pennsylvania. I chose Pennsylvania because it is the only place where all of the elements that account for understanding of racism at the time are absent. I asked what happened to William Penn’s ideals of tolerance, egalitarianism, and representative government. I examine key events where people demanded these rights for themselves. As they demanded these rights for themselves they defined themselves and others in increasingly racial terms. They made race from the bottom-up.
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Image of George Washington, "The Prayer at Valley Forge" by Arnold Friberg.