Ethan J. Kytle

Fall 2024

Spring 2025

 

• 19th-Century America
• Intellectual and Cultural History
• Civil War and Reconstruction
• Slavery and Abolition
• U.S. South
• Historical Memory
• Civil Rights Movement

Books

Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press, April 2018) [co-authored with Blain Roberts] 

• Finalist, 2019 Northern California Book Award
• Finalist, 2018 George C. Rogers Jr. Award for best book of South Carolina history
• Named one of the "Best Books of 2018" by Kirkus Reviews, Black Perspectives, Zocalo Public Square, Civil War Monitor, and book critics for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune

Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era (Cambridge University Press, August 2014; paperback, March 2016)

Articles and Book Chapters

“Freedom Fighter or Attila the Hun? How Black and White Charlestonians Remembered Denmark Vesey, 1822-2014,” in James Spady, ed., Fugitive Movements: Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World, ed. James Spady (University of South Carolina Press, January 2022) [coauthored with Blain Roberts]

"Fact, Fancy, and Nat Fuller's Feast in 1865 and 2015," in Adam Domby and Simon Lewis, eds., Freedoms Gained and Lost:  Reconstruction and Its Meaning 150 Years Later (Fordham University Press, forthcoming December 2021)

"'Our Job Is to Get It Picked': Volunteerism, Coercion, and the California Farm Labor Crisis of 1942," Boom California, March 25, 2021 [coauthored with Blain Roberts]

"Broken Tributes to a Morally Bankrupt," in Catherine Clinton and Jim Downs, eds., Confederate Statues and Memorialization (University of George Press, April 2019) [coauthored with Blain Roberts]

"A Republic of Fear," Reviews in American History, Vol. 45 (June 2017): 242-248

"'A Transcendentalist Above All': Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Brown, and the Raid at Harpers Ferry," Journal of the Historical Society, Vol. 12 (Sept. 2012): 283-308

"Looking the Thing in the Face: Slavery, Race, and the Commemorative Landscape in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865-2010," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 78 (Aug. 2012): 639-684 [co-authored with Blain Roberts]

"'Is It Okay to Talk about Slaves?' Segregating the Past in Historic Charleston," in Karen L. Cox, ed., Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (University Press of Florida, 2012) [co-authored with Blain Roberts]

"The Contradiction at the Heart of American Democracy," Reviews in American History, Vol. 36 (Sept. 2008): 390-396

"From Body Reform to Reforming the Body Politic: Transcendentalism and the Militant Antislavery Career of Thomas Wentworth Higginson," American Nineteenth Century History, Vol. 8 (Sept. 2007): 325-350

Op-ed essays for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Huffington Post, the Sacramento Bee, the Fresno Bee, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Durham Herald-Sun, LA Progressive, the History News Network, and Process: A Blog for American History

Undergraduate:

• U.S. History to 1877
• Historical Research and Writing
• The American Civil War
• The Reconstruction of America, 1865-1900
• Jacksonian America, 1815-1848
• The Rise and Fall of American Slavery

Graduate:

• Introduction to Graduate Writing and Historiography
• Civil War and Reconstruction America
• Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America
• The Civil War and Slavery in Myth and Memory

In the past few years, I followed the course of Fresno’s 1918-19 influenza pandemic in a real time blog series for Tropics of Meta and was a lead researcher and coauthor of the report for the Task Force to Review the Naming of the University Library at Fresno State.

My next book, coauthored with Blain Roberts, will be a narrative history of the 1960 school desegregation fight in New Orleans.