Matt Karp’s work concerns the politics of slavery, abolition, and Civil War in the nineteenth-century United States. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: American Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, explores the worldview of the southern master class, and the way it shaped U.S. international relations in the antebellum decades. His current book-in-progress considers the emergence of antislavery mass politics, and the rise of the Republican Party, in the years before the Civil War.
Matthew Karp
Associate Professor of History
