ERIC HERSCHTHAL

I am a historian of slavery and abolition in the United States. My first book, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (Yale University Press, 2021), explored how scientists and Black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to cast slaveholders as the enemies of modernity. I am currently working on a book about slavery's role in expanding the United States' carbon footprint, tentatively titled Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change in the United States. My research has appeared in academic journals including The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of the Early Republic, and Slavery & Abolition, among others, and has been funded by Harvard Univerity's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Huntington Library, as well as other institutions. As a former journalist, I continue to write for mainstream outlets includingThe New York Times, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books. I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University, and my B.A. from Princeton University.