Educators are innovators.
I have been the Mary O’Brien Gibson Professor of History at IUPUI since July 1998. I was born in western Pennsylvania and attended Indiana University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate, majoring in History. I did my graduate work at the Ohio State University, receiving both my M.A. and Ph.D. from that school. My academic interests at that time were focused around the U.S. Civil War era and I wrote a dissertation examining the abolitionists’ unsuccessful effort to convert the nation’s churches into militant antislavery institutions. My graduate school advisor and mentor was Merton L. Dillon, an important scholar on the history of the abolitionist movement.
My first teaching jobs were at a number of junior colleges in Dallas and Tarrant (Fort Worth) counties in Texas. In 1979, I began my affiliation with the Frederick Douglass Papers when I was hired as Assistant Editor by the project’s director, the eminent African American historian John W. Blassingame. While at Yale, I also taught courses for the History department including the “Civil War and Reconstruction Era,” long taught by C. Van Woodward, who I was privileged to get to know. I began my publication career while at Yale when my first book, The War Against Proslavery Religion, based on my dissertation, came out from Cornell University Press.
A major formative experience occurred while I was working at Yale when I supported the successful strike by the university’s clerical and technical workers in 1984-85. I joined many progressive faculty and graduate students who refused to cross picket lines and instead moved classes off campus. I got to know Yale’s famed labor historian David Montgomery and some of his students. I authored my second book On Strike for Respect, published originally by the radical Charles H. Hill Press and later picked up by the respected labor history series of the University of Illinois Press. Inspired by these activities, I developed a course entitled “The History of Work in America” that I still teach today.
In 1989, I left Yale to take a teaching position in the History department at West Virginia University. While there, I continued to work as consultant with the Frederick Douglass Papers, helping complete the project’s Speeches, Debates, and Interview series of volumes. In 1994, Blassingame agreed to my taking over his role as director of the Douglass Papers. I also co-edited three new book-length collections of original essays on topics of nineteenth century history in the 1990s while there.
In 1998, I transferred the Frederick Douglass Papers to IUPUI. Over the years here under my direction, the project has completed a three-volume Autobiographical Writing series and published three volumes of the Correspondence series and the first of a two-volume Journalism and Other Writings series. In recent years, the project has expanded its catalog by publishing three paperbacks: a critical edition of Douglass Narrative, a critical edition of his novella “The Heroic Slave” (with the editorial collaboration of Robert Levine and John Stauffer), and like a well-established rock band, a “Best Hits” volume of Douglass’s twenty most influential speeches. The Douglass Papers also sponsors a biannual symposium on Douglass’s life and times, publishes the annual interdisciplinary journal The New North Star, and sponsors the Hoosiers Reading Frederick Douglass Together program.
At IUPUI, I continue to teach the “Civil War and Reconstruction Era” and “The History of Work in America” courses and have added new ones entitled “American Dissent!,” “Parties, Presidents, and Politics,” and “the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.” I enjoy working with graduate students as a thesis advisor and have mentored undergraduates in a years-long project to map Douglass’s speaking itinerary.
In scholarship at IUPUI, besides my many Douglass Papers volumes, I authored a biography of the nineteenth century American radical journalist James Redpath, published by Cornell University Press, and coedited an encyclopedia of American Antislavery and Abolition, published by ABC-CLIO. My most recently published book was Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland, published by The University of Edinburgh Press and coauthored with British historian Hannah-Rose Murray, Currently I am researching my next book contracted to Fordham University Press: The First Sixties: Frederick Douglass and the Radical Reconstruction of America.
Jack Kaufman-McKivigan
MARY O’BRIEN GIBSON PROFESSOR OF UNITED STATES HISTORY, IUPUI
EDITOR, The Frederick Douglass Papers