👤 Biography

My passion for history emerged from countless hours spent pouring over my maternal grandfather’s photos and newspaper clippings from the Second World War. Like many young men of his generation, Ted Kaminski traded his High School career as an athlete for military service in the worldwide struggle against fascism. Serving as a ship’s cook on the U.S.S. Lenawee, he saw the unprecedented war and destruction of the Pacific Theatre first hand. Among the photos tucked away in a much larger collection of snapshots chronicling the life of Ted, his wife, my maternal grandmother, June, and their two children was an unamed soldier smiling into the camera while holding a severed Japanese head. History was always my strongest subject in school, but the discovery of such a shocking photo piqued my interest in understanding the political and economic forces that could lead an everyday person to pose for such a photo.

Although I devoted a great deal of time to studying World War II--particularly the Holocaust--in High School, I shifted my focus to African American history as an undergraduate History major at Utica College (now Utica University). During my sophomore year, a complicated jaw surgery to correct TMJ precipitated serious hemorrhaging that nearly cost me my life. Forced to take a medical leave, I returned to college the following semester and enrolled in Dr. Paul Young’s course on civil rights and Black nationalism. Paul combined his professional training as a labor and social historian with a decades-long fight for civil rights and social justice to walk students through how socially constructed ideas about race, class, and gender translated into exploitive power relationships that precipitated the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Exposed to complicated ideas like intersectionality, anti-Black racism in policing, and the intellectual divisions within the civil rights movement, I decided to pursue a doctorate in American history. When Paul offered a graduate seminar on African American historiography, he encouraged me to enroll in the class as an advanced undergraduate history major. It was in that class that I turned my attention to the topics that would come to define my professional career as a historian: the Civil War and Reconstruction. In reading a variety of authors from W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction to Heather Cox Richardson’s The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901, I traced the rise of the Dunning School in the historical profession as an extension of the Lost Cause’s broader counterrevolution to overthrow Reconstruction and restore white supremacy as the centerpiece of the nation’s political economy.

Like many who read DuBois’s Black Reconstruction, I was enthralled by his biting condemnation of the Dunning School’s purposeful distortion of American history. “The treatment of the period of Reconstruction,” DuBois argued, “reflects small credit upon American historians as scientists. We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans. In order to paint the South as a martyr to inescapable fate, to make the North the magnanimous emancipator, and to ridicule the Negro as the impossible joke in the whole development, we have in fifty years, by libel, innuendo and silence, so completely misstated and obliterated the history of the Negro in America and his relation to its work and government that today it is almost unknown. This may be fine romance, but it is not science. It may be inspiring, but it is certainly not the truth. And beyond this it is dangerous.... [I]t has, more than that, led the world to embrace and worship the color bar as social salvation and it is helping to range mankind in ranks of mutual hatred and contempt, at the summons of a cheap and false myth.” DuBois’s condemnation of white supremacy within the historical profession served as an important intellectual foundation for my graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

At UMass, I never lost sight of the fact that I prepared for my qualifying exams, conducted research, and wrote numerous papers in the W.E.B Du Bois Library, named for the same individual that had sparked my intellectual curiosity in Reconstuction as an undergrad. The ability to take classes and work with historians whose scholarship I admire helped me to develop an ambitious dissertation: “A Generational Divide: The Reconstruction of American Party Politics, 1865-1912.” The project positioned the fluid political environment set in motion by the Civil War, Reconstruction, and late nineteenth-century industrialization as a catalyst to the intergenerational reconstruction of national party politics. Responding to the exploding popular discontent and third party movements that increasingly supported a political realignment following the birth of monopolies and trusts, Republican and Democratic leaders abandoned the Civil War generation’s support for decentralized power distributed to the states for competing visions of how the regulatory power of the federal government should be employed to promote democracy by preventing the formation of oligarchies.

Unfortunately, the onset of a global pandemic has delayed the process of editing my dissertation into a book manuscript. Although I have authored numerous book reviews, the realities of the academic job market have forced me to focus on publishing journal articles while adjuncting at two universities that require more than an hour drive in opposing directions from where I live. As is so often the case with adjuncts, the lack of any real access to funding and institutional resources has made it all the more difficult to travel to archives. Despite this, I currently have an article titled, ““A Full Measure of Citizenship”: Black Grassroots Activism in Reconstruction and Gilded Age Oneida County, New York,” under review for New York History. Additionally, I’m working on a second article examining the influential role that Ellis H. Roberts played in the Republican Party’s transition from supporting Black civil rights during Reconstruction to redefining itself as a voice for Big Business in the 1880s and 1890s.