Interview is with Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Lecturer and Coordinator of Public History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Contributor: Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power
Was there a specific motive to write, “‘Vagrant Negroes’: The Policing of Labor and Mobility in the Upper South in the Early Republic.” ?
Since the colonial era, the mobility and labor of the poor – white and black, enslaved, indentured, and free – has been policed by state authorities. As gradual abolition laws were put in place after the late eighteenth century and rates of self-emancipation among enslaved people rose, this policing became more markedly racialized. This essay documents the ways in which the decisions that poor people, especially people of color in southern states, made about their freedom, residence, movement, and employment were circumscribed by all levels of government through surveillance, incarceration, and other forms of punishment in the antebellum Upper South.
What sparked your interest in labor history?
I became interested in labor history in graduate school when I realized that it was the corner of the literature where all of the stories of the working people with whom I had grown up could be found. When I first read E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, it was a revelation to know that there were historians out there who understood that resistance to oppression and economic degradation could take many forms, and didn’t always need to involve formal organization, but rather often consisted of the daily struggle to get by. As I kept reading, it was through this lens that I was able to comprehend more deeply the ways in which race, sex, and class have intersected in the lives of historical actors and in our own.
Why do you think that the study of labor history is important today?
I believe that, as historians, we have an obligation to do our best to explicate the historical origins of our contemporary struggles in a way that is meaningful for as many people as possible. This is why the field of public history exists – but this is also a central tenet of good labor history, as it is within that wide audience, as opposed to the audience of academics, that the experience of that connection lies.
What are you currently working on or researching?
My first book, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic will be published by New York University Press in January 2019. It’s a social and legal history of indigent transiency: the intersections between labor status, poverty, and mobility in the early nineteenth century US. Primarily, it focuses on the use of poor laws and vagrancy laws to police and punish the movements and subsistence activities of the lower classes, as well as the ways in which they moved, resisted, and carved out space for themselves in a volatile economic climate. Much of this story centers around the punishment and incarceration of the poor, and the various ways in which these experiences were shaped by individuals’ race, sex, and nativity, arguing that it is through the implementation of poor laws and vagrancy laws that we can chart the criminalization of poverty and of the mobility of the poor in early America.