Associate Professor
Ph.D., Cornell University (1997)
African American; historical memory; public commemorations


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Office: 4311 Friedmann Hall
E-mail: mitch.kachun@wmich.edu
Phone: (269) 387-4634

Teaching

At the undergraduate level, in addition to general surveys of early US (HIST 2100) and African American History (HIST 3280), I regularly teach HIST 4360: Topics in African American History.  Recent topics for this course have been Free Blacks, 1700-1865; Commemoration and Memory in African American History; African American Civil Rights Activism, 1890-1980; and African Americans in Michigan.  I occasionally teach other core courses for History majors.  At the graduate level I offer readings and seminar courses in African American History, Historical Memory and Commemoration, and Atlantic History.

Research

My research concentrates on how African Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries have used historical knowledge and public commemorations in their efforts to work for equal rights, construct a sense of collective identity, and claim control over their status and destiny in American society.  Some current projects include papers or articles dealing with black patriotism at the 1901 Pan American Exposition; emancipation celebrations’ role in fostering regional networks in the 19th century; and a book assessing Crispus Attucks’s place in American historical memory.

Publications

My most recent book is a co-edited edition of an 1865 novel written by an African American woman, which is now appearing in book form for the first time: The Curse of Caste; or the Slave Bride: a Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins (Oxford University Press, 2006).  My previous book, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) was released in paperback in March 2006.  Recent articles include: “African Americans, Public Commemorations, and the Haitian Revolution: A Problem of Historical Mythmaking” (Journal of the Early Republic, Summer 2006); “’A beacon to oppressed peoples everywhere’: Richard R. Wright Sr., National Freedom Day, and the Rhetoric of Freedom in the 1940s” (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, July 2004); and “'Our platform is as broad as humanity': Transatlantic Freedom Movements and the Idea of Progress in Nineteenth Century African American Thought and Activism,” (Slavery and Abolition, December 2003).  I have contributed entries in numerous reference volumes, as well as reviews in the Journal of Negro History, Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, Journal of American Ethnic History, and others.