Department of History

Sam is a social historian of labor and technology in the nineteenth-century United States. Much of his research explores how enslaved people and other workers contested the constant imposition of new means and methods of production in activities such as cotton ginning and sugar milling. By foregrounding the social struggles that both arose from and propelled technological change, he aims to illuminate broader contradictions in Atlantic capitalism that linked the U.S. South to the staple societies of the Caribbean and Brazil and to the industrial economies of the British Isles. Sam holds a B.A. from Princeton and an M.A. from Queen's University Belfast.