Research Projects
Learn more below about my archival research: a PhD dissertation, MA thesis, and senior honor's thesis.
Dream Deregulated
My PhD dissertation examines the intersection of housing finance and civil rights in the late-20th century United States.
READ MOREFreedpeoples' Education
My MA thesis investigates the role of native southern black teachers in Reconstruction North Carolina.
Dag Hammarskjold College
My senior honors thesis explores the founding and fall of Dag Hammarskjold College, an experiment in "polycultural education.
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Dream Deregulated
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Abstract: Beginning in the late 1970s, policymakers enacted a series of legislative and regulatory changes that, by 1985, combined to dismantle the New Deal-era system of housing finance. These policy changes fundamentally restructured the way that Americans accessed credit for homeownership from primarily borrowing via long-term, fixed-rate mortgages from local, federally insured S&Ls that collected deposits at a regulated cost, to increasingly borrowing through adjustable-rate mortgages issued by unregulated brokers who then sold those mortgages to investors in a secondary market, typically through an intermediary such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. "Dream Deregulated" argues that this transformation of housing finance undermined the progressive intent of the open housing and community reinvestment initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s by making housing credit less stable for all borrowers, relative to the New Deal system, and by largely disconnecting housing finance from the institutional structure that the civil rights initiatives were designed to regulate. It further argues that policymakers pursued broad deregulation of housing finance only after their pursuit of a narrower agenda of deregulation, that of deposit interest rate ceilings, opened the door to a series of arguments for further deregulation, particularly of S&L assets, including authorization of adjustable rate mortgages. The populist politics of the deregulation of deposit rate ceilings, taken up by and on behalf of "small savers," provided a discursive wedge for advocates of broader deregulation, taken up by and on behalf of the interests of the largest financial institutions and a neoliberal political agenda. "Dream Deregulated" investigates the policymaking process as a case study in what Paul Pierson calls "politics in time." This study bridges scholarship on fair housing and community reinvestment with that on the deregulation of housing finance, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the politics of opportunity in the United States during the latter third of the twentieth century. It historicizes the politics of financial deregulation, and, with its focus on the populist politics of deregulation, helps to explain the "construction of consent" to a neoliberal regime. Finally, "Dream Deregulated" demonstrates how a contradictory complex of housing policies contributed to the S&L crisis in the late 1980s, the financial crisis in the 2000s, and an ongoing housing affordability crisis.
Freedpeoples' Education
Link to full text.
In post-emancipation North Carolina, communities of freedpeople actively sought
to establish and maintain schools for their children. While accepting aid from the
Freedmen’s Bureau and northern missionary societies, freedpeople contributed
their own resources and labor to sustain schools and attempted to retain control
over the form and content of education in those schools. Black native
southerners succeeded in reasserting their control over freedpeople’s education
by filling the majority of teaching positions in the schools, and by increasingly
pouring their resources into Sabbath schools in which they exercised
considerable autonomy. Drawing on the correspondence, monthly reports, and
other papers of the North Carolina State Superintendent of Education for the
Freedmen’s Bureau, federal census records, North Carolina public laws, reports
of the North Carolina State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and other
reports and biographies, this study shows that black southerners made up a
majority of the teaching force in freedpeople’s schools in North Carolina as early
as July 1867, and attempts to paint a collective portrait of these teachers using a
sample of 42 teachers. This study also shows that in addition to day-schools,
Sabbath schools offered the opportunity to read and write to thousands of
freedpeople, including those who could not attend day-schools.
Dag Hammarskjold College
Founded by former Baptist minister, Robert L. McCan, Dag Hammarskjold College was a short-lived experiement in polycultural living and learning in Columbia, Maryland, in the 1970s.