Eric Herschthal

I am an historian of slavery and abolition in the United States and the wider Atlantic World. My research and teaching interests include 19th century United States history, African American history, the history of science, medicine, and technology, and climate history. 

My first book, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (Yale, 2021), explores how men of science and Black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to cast slaveholders as the enemies of science. It challenges the assumption that slaveholders, vis a vis scientific racism, had the upper hand when it came to scientific debates over slavery. My next book project, tentatily titled Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change, explores the role slave plantations played in laying the foundations for today's climate change crisis. 

My scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Slavery & Abolition, The Journal of the Early Republic, The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Early American Studies, as well as other journals. My research on Frederick Douglass and science will appear in a forthcoming volume of new scholarship on Douglass titled Frederick Douglass in Context (Cambridge Univ. Press). In addition, I recently co-authored a chapter with the historian John Brooke (Ohio State) and climate scientist Jed O. Kaplan (Univ. of Hong Kong) on global commodities and climate change that will appear in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Commodities History (Oxford Univ. Press). 

My research has been supported by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Omohundro Institute, and the African American & African Studies Department at the Ohio State University, among other institutions.

I received my Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, a B.A. in history from Princeton University, and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. As a former journalist, I also continue to write for publications such as The New York Times, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books.

Education 

2017 Columbia University, Ph.D., History Department
Dissertation: “The Science of Antislavery: Scientists, Antislavery, and the Myth of Slavery’s
Backwardness” / Finalist for 2018 History Department’s Bancroft Prize for Best Dissertation
Committee: Christopher L. Brown (advisor), Eric Foner (chair), David Waldstreicher, Matthew
Jones, James Delbourgo

2009 Columbia University, M.S. in Journalism, Graduate School of Journalism

2006 Princeton University, B.A. in History, cum laude
Thesis: “Jubans: How Jews Became Cubans, 1900-1960”

Source: University of Utah