Books by Matt Karp
Harvard University Press, 2016
When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who pr... more When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics. As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. The empire of their dreams was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy―not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.
Papers by Matt Karp
Catalyst, 2019
The destruction of slavery in the United States was a landmark in the global history of emancipat... more The destruction of slavery in the United States was a landmark in the global history of emancipation, and remains the most revolutionary transformation in America's national history. This essay argues that the process leading up to the overthrow of slavery was neither the accidental byproduct of capitalist development, nor the triumph of an enlightened activist vanguard, but a battle waged and won in the field of democratic mass politics.
Journal of the Civil War Era, 2019
In Andrew Shankman, ed., The World of the Revolutionary Republic (Routledge, 2014)
Book Reviews by Matt Karp
Review of John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Portable Frederick Douglass (2016), ... more Review of John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Portable Frederick Douglass (2016), and Robert Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016), The Nation, March 14, 2017
Review of Ben Wilson, Heyday: The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age, Boston Review, October 3,... more Review of Ben Wilson, Heyday: The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age, Boston Review, October 3, 2016
Journal of American History, Mar 2015
Public Books, May 1, 2014
Journal of Southern History, Aug 2013
Miscellaneous Writing by Matt Karp
Jacobin, May 1, 2014
Like the abolitionists, Chris Hayes argues, climate activists must mount “a movement of disposses... more Like the abolitionists, Chris Hayes argues, climate activists must mount “a movement of dispossession” against the fossil fuel companies. But the force of his analogy is stronger than the actual argument.
The Junto (and Jacobin)
12 Years a Slave rightly grounds slavery in economic exploitation, but reflects our era's painful... more 12 Years a Slave rightly grounds slavery in economic exploitation, but reflects our era's painful uncertainty about how that exploitation can be opposed.
Jacobin, Apr 2013
For today’s beleaguered left, it’s tempting to pine over the past. But the lives of two socialist... more For today’s beleaguered left, it’s tempting to pine over the past. But the lives of two socialist intellectuals remind us that no one should be too nostalgic for the twentieth century.
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Books by Matt Karp
Papers by Matt Karp
Book Reviews by Matt Karp
Miscellaneous Writing by Matt Karp