A hybrid fellow’s forum with David Carlson, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Notre Dame from June 22, 2023. Recording available.
About the Presentation
David Carlson’s research examines the connection between the end of the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of the internal slave trade in Virginia. Throughout the revolutionary era, many states, including Virginia banned importation of enslaved Africans. Shortly thereafter, as the United States expanded westward, Virginian slaveowners began selling the enslaved to slave traders who carried them to southwestern slave markets. Carlson’s research indicates that while the internal slave trade existed as long as slavery, westward expansion created the conditions for the internal slave trade to expand dramatically and grow to transcontinental scale. The suppression of the transatlantic slave trade did not create, but rather made legible the existence of a distinct and sprawling internal slave trade.
About David Carlson
David Carlson is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, where he works with Dr. Patrick Griffin on the study of slavery, the slave trade and its abolition in the early United States and the anglophone Atlantic. He has an A.A.S. in manufacturing engineering technology and graduated with a B.A. in History from Carthage College. He worked in manufacturing for several years but returned to academia to pursue an M.A. in History from Northern Illinois University, where he worked with Dr. Aaron Fogleman. Most of his time not spent working on his dissertation is taken up by his two beautiful children.