Education
Ph.D., Temple University, 2011
Andrew Diemer, Ph.D.
Professor
Contact Info
Areas of Expertise
United States in the 19th century, African American history; history of slavery and anti-slavery
Biography
Andrew Diemer joined the history department in 2011. He earned his PhD from Temple University in the same year. He is author of The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016, and most recently of Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad, published in 2022 by Alfred A. Knopf.
Selected Publications
Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022)
The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863 (University of Georgia Press, 2016).
“The Business of the Road: William Still, the Vigilance Committee, and the Management of the Underground Railroad,” Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2022)
“’Agitation, tumult, violence will not cease’: Black Politics and the Compromise of 1850,” Emancipations, Reconstructions, and Revolutions: African American Politics and U.S.
History from the First to the Second Civil War, eds. Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
Recent Book Reviews
Book Review, Dennis Patrick Halpin, A Brotherhood of Liberty: Black Reconstruction and its Legacies in Baltimore, 1865-1920. The Journal of the Civil War Era (March 2021), 135-137
Book Review, Andrew Heath, In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (April 2020), 337-339
Book Review, Adam Costanzo, George Washington’s Washington: Visions for the National Capital in the Early American Republic and Adam Malka, Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation. Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2020), 140-144
Recent Lectures and Presentations
“’There Will Be a Funeral in the Coal Yard Now’: William Still and his Rivals,” Black Lives and Freedom Journeys: The Legacies of the Still Family of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, Oct. 7-8, 2021
“The Politics of the Disfranchised: Black Abolitionists and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,” Racial Democracy: Challenges to Civic Democratic Ideals in American History, Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands, May 7-8, 2020, (Postponed due to COVID – held online, December 10-11, 2020)
“William Still’s Dilemma: African American Partisanship in the Twilight of Reconstruction,” Political History Symposium, University of Virginia, April 20, 2018
“‘Agitation, tumult, violence will not cease’: Black Politics and the Compromise of 1850,” –Emancipations, Reconstructions, Revolutions and Civil Wars: African American Politics and U.S. History in the Long 19th Century, New York, NY and Philadelphia,PA, Feb. 10-11, 2017
Courses Taught
| FALL 2023 | |
|---|---|
| HIST 145 | History of the United States to the Civil War |
| HIST 375 | The City in American History |