Andrew N. Wegmann
Email: andrew.wegmann@ttu.edu
Ph.D., Louisiana State University
I teach courses on the Early American Republic, the Atlantic World, African-American history, and the 19th-century United States. My research interests include race and freedom in the Atlantic World, Liberia and the African colonization movement in the United States, the history of ideas, Jeffersonian republicanism, and the history of Creole communities in New Orleans and the Gulf South. I am the author of An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2022) and co-editor of French Connections: Cultural Mobility in North America and the Atlantic World (Louisiana State University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Wilson Prize for Canadian History. I am also co-author of U.S. History: A Top Hat Interactive Textbook, published in August 2016, and served as primary editor and author of “The Cotton Revolution” in The American Yawp. I also recently completed an interdisciplinary volume of essays, co-edited with James Andrew Whitaker and Shawn P. Lambert, on collective memory and material culture in Americo-Liberian history for Indiana University Press.
Most fundamentally, I am a social historian with deep interest in how society interacts with the individuals who create it and the political and cultural forces that give it external meaning. Over the course of my career, I have benefitted from the support of the Mellon Foundation, the Howard Lamar Center and Davenport College at Yale, MiSHA, the European Union, and the Institut des Amériques for a number of projects, past and present. My current book project, entitled Building the African-American Republic: The Founding of Liberia and the Americans Who Made it Possible, bridges the physical and historical gaps between mother and daughter nations. It traces the origins of Liberia back to its American founders, finding them first in the context of their lives as free people of color in the border states of the 18th- and 19th-century United States and leaving them as Liberian founders of a continent’s first modern republic.
Prior to arriving at Texas Tech, I taught for eight years at Delta State University in Mississippi. I received my B.A. in history from Spring Hill College and my M.A. and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, just up the road from my hometown of New Orleans.
Select Publications
An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2022)
Beginning with the French founding of New Orleans in 1718 and concluding with the
outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, An American Color seeks to correct this
vision. By tracing the impact of racial science, law, and personal reputation and
identity through multiple colonial and territorial regimes, it shows how locally born
mulâtres in French New Orleans became part of a self-conscious, identifiable community
of Creoles of color in the United States. An American Color places this local history
in the wider context of the North American continent and the Atlantic world. This
book shows that New Orleans and its free population of color did not develop in a
cultural, legal, or intellectual vacuum. More than just a study of race and law, this
work tells a story of humanity in the Atlantic world, a story of how a people on the
French colonial frontier in the mid-eighteenth century became unlikely, accepted parts
of a vast political, social, and racial United States without ever leaving home.
https://ugapress.org/book/9780820360782/an-american-color/
French Connections: Cultural Mobility in North America and the Atlantic World, 1600–1875,
with Robert Englebert (Louisiana State University Press, 2020)
Winner, The Wilson Prize for Canadian Historyem>
French Connections examines how the movement of people, ideas, and social practices
contributed to the complex processes and negotiations involved in being and becoming
French in North America and the Atlantic World between the years 1600 and 1875. Engaging
a wide range of topics, from religious and diplomatic performance to labor migration,
racialization, and both imagined and real conceptualizations of “Frenchness” and “Frenchification,”
this volume argues that cultural mobility was fundamental to the development of French
colonial societies and the collective identities they housed. Cases of cultural formation
and dislocation in places as diverse as Quebec, the Illinois Country, Detroit, Haiti,
Acadia, New England, and France itself demonstrate the broad variability of French
cultural mobility that took place throughout this massive geographical space. Nevertheless,
these communities shared the same cultural root in the midst of socially and politically
fluid landscapes, where cultural mobility came to define, and indeed sustain, communal
and individual identities in French North America and the Atlantic World.
https://lsupress.org/9780807178188/french-connections/
Department of History
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Address
Texas Tech University, Box 41013, 3001 15th Street, Humanities (formerly English/Philosophy) 165, Lubbock, TX 79409 -
Phone
806.742.3744 | Fax: 806.742.1060 -
Email
info.history@ttu.edu