Author Book Talk: Seth Rockman

About this event

Thursday, September 24 | 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Free, virtual program; registration required About the Author: Seth Rockman is a historian of the United States focusing on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War and serves as George L. Littlefield Professor of American History and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History at Brown University. His research unfolds at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, and the history of capitalism. Rockman’s earlier work— the award-winning Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009) and the co-edited volume Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016)— sought to better understand the relationship of slavery and capitalism in the American past. In December 2022, Rockman shared his research findings with the US House Financial Services Committee in live testimony. Rockman’s newest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, was published by University of Chicago Press in Fall 2024 and named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. The book won the 2025 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, earned distinction as a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize, and appears on the longlist for the Cundill Prize. At Brown, Rockman sits on the faculty advisory board of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and leads their Slavery and Finance research cluster. He published “The Dialectics of Racism and Repair” in the 2021 re-issue of the university’s influential Slavery & Justice Report. Rockman is a faculty affiliate of the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance and regularly teaches a course on slavery and capitalism for the IE-Brown Executive MBA program. About the Book: The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But…

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