John Craig Hammond is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at Penn State New Kensington in suburban Pittsburgh, and Discipline Coordinator for Arts & Humanities in Penn State’s University College. He is also an avid footballer, playing in the GPSL (Greater Pittsburgh Soccer League) 019 Co-ed Division with his daughters, and serving as a player-manager for an 050 Premier Division team.
Associate Professor of History
Assistant Director of Academic Affairs
Penn State University, New Kensington
Education
Ph. D. History, University of Kentucky (2004)
M. A. History, University of Kentucky (2002)
B. A. Physics, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA (1997)
Academic Appointments
Associate Professor of History, Penn State University, New Kensington, 2014 – present
Discipline Coordinator, Arts & Humanities, University College, 2024 – present
Assistant Director of Academic Affairs, July 2018 – present
Assistant Professor of History, Penn State University, New Kensington, 2008 – 2014
Assistant Professor of History, Purdue University Calumet, 2005 – 2008
Adjunct Professor, History, University of Kentucky, 2004 – 2005
Adjunct Professor, History and Liberal Arts, Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky, 2004 – 2005
Publications
Books
The Centrality of Slavery: Empire, Enslavement, and Sovereignty in Colonial Illinois and Missouri, University of Pennsylvania Press, Fall 2025
Co-editor (with Jeffrey L. Pasley) A Firebell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 2, The Missouri Question and Its Answers, University of Missouri Press, 2021
Co-Editor (With Jeffrey L. Pasley) A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume I, Western Slavery, National Impasse University of Missouri Press, 2021
Co-editor (with Matthew Mason), Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Freedom and Bondage in the New American Nation, University of Virginia Press, Jeffersonian America Series, 2011, paperback 2012
Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, University of Virginia Press, Jeffersonian American Series, 2007, paperback 2024
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“From the Stacks: Research Center – Columbia, Records of Indigenous Enslavement in the Ste. Genevieve Archives,” with Penn State Graduate Student in French, Emily Peebles, Missouri Historical Review, 118 (January 2024), 148 – 154.
“Inveterate Imperialists: Contested Imperialisms, North American History, and the Coming of the U.S. Civil War,” American Nineteenth Century History 22 no. 2 (2021), 1 – 24. [Revised version reprinted in A Continent in Crisis: The U.S. Civil War in North America, eds., Brian Schoen, Jewel L. Spangler, and Frank Towers, (Fordham University Press, 2022)]
“‘Useful to the Public Business’: Mathurin-Michel Amoureux’s 1803 Letter from New Madrid,” With Thomas J. Slancauskas (undergraduate student), Missouri Historical Review 115 no. 4 (July 2021), 296 – 319.
“The Centrality of Slavery: Enslavement and Settler Sovereignty in Missouri, 1770 – 1820” in Pasley and Hammond eds., A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume I, Western Slavery, National Impasse, 43 – 76.
“The 1821 Project,” with Jeffrey Pasley, in Pasley and Hammond eds., A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume II, The Missouri Question and Its Answers, 3 – 30.
“The Missouri Crisis as Early American History,” with Jeffrey Pasley, in Pasley and Hammond eds., A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume I, Western Slavery, National Impasse, 3 – 40.
“Mastery over Slaves, Sovereignty over Slavery: James Monroe, Virginia, and the Missouri Crisis,” in Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founders on America’s Future, eds., Peter Onuf and Robert M.S. McDonald, (University of Virginia Press, 2021), 194 – 222.
“President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Politics of Slavery,” Journal of American History, 105 (March 2019), 843 – 867
“Mid-Continent Borderlands: Illinois and the Early American Republic, 1774–1854,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Special Issue, “Illinois History—A Bicentennial Appraisal,” 111 (Spring/Summer 2018), 31 – 54, (Awarded Dorothy Schwieder Prize for the best article in Midwestern History, Midwestern Historical Society, 2018)
“Not ‘Braveheart for Black People,’ but ‘Braveheart with Black People,’” in “The Birth of a Nation: A Roundtable” ed., Ryan Keating, Civil War History, 64 (March 2018), 56 – 91
“The Growth and Decline of Slavery in North America,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, ed. Trevor Burnard, Oxford University Press, 2017
“Race, Slavery, Sectional Conflict, and National Politics, 1770 – 1820,” in Jonathan Daniel Wells ed., The Routledge History of Nineteenth Century America (Routledge, 2017), 11 – 32
“Slavery, Sectionalism, and the Constitution of 1787” Common Place, Fall 2016 (Issue 16:4)
“Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empires: North American Borderlands and the American Civil War, 1660–1860,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (June 2014), 264-298 —[Revised version published as “The ‘High-Road to a Slave Empire:’ Conflict and the Growth and Expansion of Slavery on the North American Continent,” in Andrew Shankman ed., The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent (Routledge, 2014), 559 – 598]
-[Translated and published, with an introduction, in Japanese by Takeo Mori, Fukuoka University Humanities Review 56 no.4, 1455 – 1499]
“‘The Most Free of the Free States:’ Politics, Slavery, Race, and Regional Identity in Early Ohio,” Ohio History (2014), 35-57
(Nominee, Dorothy Schwieder Prize for the best Article in Midwestern History published in 2014)
“Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770-1820,” Journal of the Early Republic, 32 (Summer 2012), 175-206
“‘Uncontrollable Necessity:’ The Local Politics, Geo-Politics, and Sectional Politics of Slavery Expansion,” in Hammond and Mason, eds., Contesting Slavery, 138-160
“Introduction: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Politics in the Early American Republic,” with Matthew Mason, in Hammond and Mason eds., Contesting Slavery, 1-8
“‘They Are Very Much Interested in Obtaining an Unlimited Slavery’: Rethinking the Territorial Expansion of Slavery in the Louisiana Purchase Territories, 1803 – 1805.” Journal of the Early Republic, 23 (Fall 2003), 353 – 380
“‘We Are to Be Reduced to the Level of Slaves’: Slavery, Planters, Taxes,
Aristocrats, and Massachusetts Antifederalists, 1787-1788,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 31 (Summer 2003), 172 – 198
Instructional Materials
Chapter Reading Guides for Peter N. Stearns, Globalization in World History (New York: Routledge, 2016), 2nd ed.
Chapter Reading Guides for Andrew Schocket, Fighting over the Founders:
How We Remember the American Revolution (New York: NYU Press, 2016)
Newspaper Editorial
“How to Get Corruption Out of State Government,” Bucks County (PA) Courier Times and Doylestown (PA) Intelligencer, June 5, 2017
Review Essays
Review Essay of Calvin Schermerhorn, Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018) in Reviews in History (UK), (Summer 2019)
Review Essay of Graham A. Peck, Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017) for Reviews in History (UK), (Summer 2018)
Review Essay of Patrick Rael, Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1776 – 1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), in Reviews in History (UK), (Fall 2016), http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1994
Book Reviews
Review of Paul D. Naish, Slavery and Silence: Latin America and the U.S. Slave Debate, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) in Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 2019)
Review of Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman eds., The American Revolution Reborn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) in History: The Journal of the Historical Association (UK), (March 2018)
H-Diplo, Review and Forum on Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), (October 2017)
Review of Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, (Summer 2017)
Review of R.J.M Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) in Florida Historical Quarterly (Spring, 2015)
Review of Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) in Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (Spring 2014)
Review of Jennifer Hull Dorsey, Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011) in American Historical Review (June 2012)
Review of Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2011), H-SHEAR, May 2011
Review of Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) in Journal of Social History (Fall 2011)
Review of Stephen Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) in Journal of American History, (June, 2010)
Review of Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) in Journal of the Early Republic, (Spring 2008)
Review of Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the
Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006) in Indiana Magazine of History, (June 2008)
Review of Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) in American Nineteenth Century History, (March 2007)
Review of T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) in Pennsylvania History (Summer 2004)
Review of John Kukla, A Wilderness so Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) in Pennsylvania History (Spring 2004)
Encyclopedia Entries
Introduction to “Common Sense” in Colonial Roots, Settlement through 1783, Vol. 1, History Through Literature; American Voices, American Themes, ed., Jeffrey H. Hacker (M.E. Sharpe 2014; Routledge, 2015).
“Territorial Expansion,” in Encyclopedia of American Political History, Vol. 2, 1784-1840, (Washington, D.C., Congressional Quarterly Press 2009)
“Anti-Masonry” and “Knights of the Golden Circle,” in American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Company, 2009)
“New Orleans” and “Madison Washington” in Encyclopedia of the Middle Passage (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007)
“New Jersey,” “Delaware,” “Paxton Boys,” “Edmund Andros,” “Delaware River,” “Natchez,” “Louisiana,” “New Amsterdam,” “Susquehanna,” “Chesapeake,” “Common Sense” and “Thomas Paine,” in Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Company, 2006)
“Cassius Clay,” in Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Podcasts
Professor Buzzkill History Podcast, “Did Jesus Write the US Constitution?” June 2020, https://professorbuzzkill.libsyn.com/did-jesus-write-the-us-constitution
Professor Buzzkill History Podcast #310, “Violence and Terror in American Slavery,” June 2019, https://professorbuzzkill.libsyn.com/310-violence-and-terrorism-in-american-slavery
Presentations, Seminars, and Conferences
“Beyond Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion” in Roundtable Panel, “Twin Sins: The Intertwined Histories of Slavery & Indigenous Dispossession,” Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) Annual Conference, Philadelphia, July 2024
“The Missouri Crisis at 200,” Guest Lecture/Presentation, Kansas City Public Library, Signature Events Lecture Series, August 2021
“The Missouri Crisis at 200,” Guest Lecture/Presentation, Missouri Statehood Day, State Historical Society of Missouri, August 2021
“The Centrality of Slavery: Settlement, Enslavement, and Middle-Class Slaveholders in Missouri, 1770 – 1820,” web-based colloquium and discussion for the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri, May 2020.
“The Great Missouri Question: Slavery and Sectional Conflict, 1819 – 1821,” Invited Public Lecture, Lowell Lecture Series, Sponsored by the Paul Revere Memorial Association at Old South Meeting House, Boston, MA, September 2019
Invited Panelist, “Contrary To The Law Of Nature: The Missouri Crisis & Politics of Slavery,” conference sponsored by CUNY Graduate Center and The Rufus King Manor Center, New York, NY, March 2019
Invited Commentator, “A Fire Bell in the Past: Conference on the Missouri Crisis of 1818-1821,” Conference sponsored by The Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, February 2019
“Intellectuals In An Anti-Intellectual Age: A Roundtable On History And Historians In The Contemporary Civic Sphere,” Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) Annual Conference, Philadelphia, July 2017
“Slavery, Sectionalism and the U.S. Constitution,” Invited Constitution Day Lecture, Shawnee State University, Portsmouth, Ohio, September 2016
Invited Speaker, “Thomas Jefferson on Government, Religious Liberty, and Education,”
Great American’s Day, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, November, 2015
“Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empire in the North American Borderlands, 1840 – 1861,” Remaking North American Sovereignty: Towards a Continental History of State Transformation in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Banff, Alberta, Canada, July 2015
“The Long Politics of Slavery and Empire on the North American Continent, 1660 – 1865,” Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) Annual Conference, Philadelphia, July 2014
“Mastery over Slaves, Sovereignty over Slavery: James Monroe, Virginia, and the Missouri Crisis,” Sons of the American Revolution, 4th Annual Conference on the American Revolution, in honor of Lance Banning, St. Louis, MO, June 2013
“Slavery and Sovereignty, States and Empires: The North American Continent, 1660 – 1865,” Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Annual Conference (SHEAR) Annual Conference, Baltimore, July 2012
“Slavery and Empires on the North American Continent from the English Civil War to the American Civil War,” pre-circulated seminar paper presented at “Jeffersonian Democracy: From Theory to Practice,” Conference hosted by the Department of History and the Center for Collaborative History, Princeton University, May 2012
Panel Commentator, “Defending, Eradicating, and Reversing the Atlantic Slave Trade during the Early Republic,” Southern Historical Association, Annual Conference, Baltimore Maryland, October 2011
Panel Commentator, “Three Incidents in Slavery’s Expansion,” SHEAR Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA, July 2011
“Slavery, States, and Empire: Slavery Expansion in Imperial North America, 1760 – 1820,” invited, pre-circulated seminar paper, Princeton University, Colonial Americas Workshop and the Department of History, March 2011
“Revolutionary Promises, Post-Colonial Realties, and Geo-Political Conflicts: The Slave Trade and the Expansion of Slavery in the Early American Republic, 1784 – 1820,” SHEAR Annual Conference, Rochester, NY, July 2010
“The Politics of Slavery and Sectionalism in the Early American Republic: An Historiographical Review, 1960 – 2000,” invited paper presented at British Researchers of American Nineteenth Century History (BrANCH) Annual Conference, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK, October 2009
“Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Slavery in the New American Nation, 1770 – 1840,” invited, pre-circulated seminar paper, Rocky Mountain Seminar in Early American History, Sponsored by Brigham Young University, the University of Utah, and the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, March 2009
“Making the Free Northwest: Ohio, 1790 – 1820,” The Filson Institute, Third Academic Conference, “Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis: Two Visions of America,” Louisville, Kentucky, Oct. 2008
“The Politics of Slavery Expansion, 1787 – 1820,” in the panel “New Perspectives on Slavery and Politics,” SHEAR Annual Conference, Worcester, Massachusetts, July 2007
Invited Participant, “Two Revolutions: America and France,” Liberty Fund Colloquium, Charleston, South Carolina, July 2006
“Race, Slavery, Party, and Politics in the Early National North, 1787 – 1821,” SHEAR Annual Conference, Providence Rhode Island, July, 2004
Awards, Grants, and Fellowships
The George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, Penn State University, 2025
Sabbatical Release, Penn State University, Fall 2025 (deferred)
Dorothy Schwieder Prize for the best article in Midwestern History, Midwestern Historical Society, 2018
Nominee, Alumni and Eisenhower Teaching Awards, Penn State University, Fall 2018, Fall 2023
Integrative Studies Course Creation Seed Grant, Office of General Education, Penn State University, Summer 2018
Sabbatical Release, Penn State University, Commonwealth College, 2016-2017
Excellence in Teaching Award, Penn State New Kensington, 2012
Commonwealth Campus Global Funds Grant, Penn State University, Fall 2009
Purdue University Research Foundation, Summer Faculty Research Grant, 2007
Faculty Summer Research Grant, Purdue University Calumet, School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, 2006
Filson Fellowship, Grant for Research at The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky, Spring, 2004
Dissertation Year Fellowship, University of Kentucky, 2003-2004
Professional, University, and Community Service (Selected)
Nominee, Democratic Party, Pennsylvania House of Representatives, 28th District, 2016
Speaker and Presenter, Fair Districts Pennsylvania, 2016 – 2020
Co-Coordinator, Honors Program, Penn State New Kensington, 2009 – 2020
Dorothy Schwieder Prize Committee, Midwest History Association, 2019 – 2022
Editorial Board, Journal of the Early Republic, 2019 – 2023
Article Submission Review, Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, 2022
Article Submission Review, Journal of American History, 2021
Book Manuscript Review, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020
Article Submission Review, Journal of the Early Republic, 2020
Book Manuscript Review, University of South Carolina Press, 2019
Article Submission Review, Journal of the Early Republic, Winter, Fall 2019
Article Submission Review, Journal of the Early Republic, 2018
Article Submission Review, Law and History Review, 2017
Article Submission Review, Journal of Southern History, 2017
Book Manuscript Review, Oxford University Press, 2016
Consultant, Themes in World History Series, Routledge, Fall 2015
Article Submission Review, Journal of Southern History, 2015
Article Submission Review, William and Mary Quarterly, 2014
Article Submission Review, Journal of the Civil War Era, 2014
Book Manuscript Review, University of North Carolina Press, 2014
Book Manuscript Review, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013
Article Submission Review, Journal of the Early Republic, 2013
Article Submission Review, Journal of American History, 2011
Article Submission Review, Ohio Valley History, 2010, 2011
Consultant, “Who Do you Think You Are,” Television program produced by Shed Media, Los Angeles, CA. Provided consultation and background information on slavery and French settlers in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1750 – 1810, researched life and holdings of Nicholas Janis Family, Fall 2014
Grant and Fellowship Applicants Review, Filson Historical Society, Spring 2012
Discussion Leader, Facts in Fiction: The Civil War Era, Cranberry Public Library Reading Program, sponsored by the “Read About It!” Program of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, Spring 2011
Participant, Survey and Development for Common Core Standards, Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, Spring 2011