Adam Arenson
My work focuses on the cultural history of nineteenth-century North America, though it has ranged more widely into the origins and legacies of the American West in particular. I am filing my dissertation, “City of Manifest Destiny: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War, 1848-1877,” and will become an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso in January 2009. In the mid-nineteenth century, St. Louis uniquely mirrored the nation’s regional, political, and ethnic diversity. This project considers the wider cultural impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction in this border-state metropolis, recovering African American and German perspectives and connecting local events—previously understood as outside the realm of politics—to the nation’s cultural crisis. It demonstrates how conditions in St. Louis constantly shaped national political debates, determining the balance as Manifest Destiny and slavery politics collided. Chapters consider, among other events, the Great Fire of 1849, the Gasconade train disaster, the Dred Scott decision, a "funeral" for Abraham Lincoln, and the dedication of Forest Park.
My committee includes David Blight, John Mack Faragher, Jay Gitlin, and Joanne Freeman. My orals fields were U.S. History, 1789-1917; Perspectives on the American West; and Europe and its Colonies, 1815-1914.
Originally from San Diego, I received my A.B. from Harvard in 2001, where I wrote a thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson's national reputation in the 1850s. I then worked in DC for a year, running SaveHarry.com for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. I currently serve as chair of the Telluride Association Summer Programs committee.
During my time at Yale, I have been actively involved with the Writing History colloquium, an initiative to explore how academic writing can be more innovative. I have also taken classes in the History of Art department and American Studies program, and have taught sections for Civil War, American Revolution, and Environmental History courses. All of this work has been enriched by conversations at the Western Historians' lunches and the meetings of YEAH, Yale Early American Historians, along with the opportunities offered by the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
My paper on Ansel Adams' "Eucalyptus Tree, Fort Ross, California," (1969), conceived in a graduate course and incubated in Writing History, appeared in California History in 2005; a paper on the furnishings of early "social libraries" was published in an edited volume, Library as Place, in 2007; and an essay on Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric in the Yukon appeared in the August 2007 Pacific Historical Review. I have an article forthcoming in the January 2008 Missouri Historical Review on the St. Louis Mercantile Library as a national institution, and I have an essay under review that documents how Dred, Harriet, Eliza and Lizzie Scott have been treated by history, separate from the Dred Scott case. I’ve also published two historically minded op-eds in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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