I am currently at work on a new book project on the history of corporal punishment in American public schools. The book will trace the long history of the practice from the Founding Era to the present with a focus on the perpetual efforts of parents, students, and experts to ban physical punishment in schools around the country. I focus especially on the importance of race and ethnicity in the debates over corporal punishment, arguing that the development and persistence of school segregation has allowed the practice to continue into the modern era, as forms of punishment themselves became segregated in American schools. For this project, I was recently awarded a Littleton-Griswold research grant from the American Historical Association.

I am also at work on a new research project that follows a Mississippi family that crossed the color line after the Civil War. The Burnsides of Neshoba County briefly came to attention in the national black press when a dispute over the estate of the last living son generated a series of court challenges that tested the family’s claim to whiteness. Neshoba County is better known as the place where three civil rights workers were abducted and murdered in June 1964. But a decade earlier, the county’s residents were riveted by the Burnside case, which encompassed competing claims to the family’s fortune from both white and black Burnsides and revealed the enduring contradictions of the state’s color line.