Dr David Ballantyne
- Title
- Lecturer in American History, Programme Director for Liberal Arts and Director of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies
- Location
- CBB 1.049
- Contact me
- Via email
- Phone
- 01782 734409
- d.t.ballantyne@keele.ac.uk
Biography
I am a lecturer in American History, the director of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies, and the Liberal Arts Programme Director. I received undergraduate, MPhil, and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. Before coming to Keele in 2016, I held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Leiden University.
Since June 2019, I have served as the Membership Secretary for the Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS). I also organised the February 2020 HOTCUS Winter Symposium on “Food, Health, and Welfare in U.S. History,” and was the lead organiser for the April 2023 British Association for American Studies Annual Conference.
Research and scholarship
I am a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth century United States, with a particular emphasis on the American South, politics, race relations, social policy, and memory.
My first book, New Politics in the Old South: Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), probed South Carolina Democrat Ernest F. Hollings’s negotiation of southern politics during a period of social, political, and economic transformation. My recent publications include an article examining memories of the 1873 Colfax Massacre, and a piece addressing the approach of moderate southern senators to welfare provision in the 1960s and 1970s (part of a Journal of American Studies special issue on "Food, Health and Welfare in the Long Twentieth Century" that I edited).
I am currently completing a study of central Louisiana between roughly 1860 and 1880. This project scrutinises the relationship between war and Reconstruction in the region, and the extent and viability of Black political and economic advances in the rural Deep South.
Publications
Research Publications
- "Remembering the Colfax Massacre: Race, Sex, and the Meanings of Reconstruction Violence, "Journal of Southern History 87, no. 3 (2021): 427-66.
- “Whose Hearth and Home? White Civil War-Era Loyalties in Central Louisiana,” book chapter in Laura Sandy and Marie Molloy (eds), Negotiating the Peripheries: The Civil War and Slavery Reconsidered (London: Routledge, 2019), 53-77.
- “‘Whenever the Yankees Were Gone, I Was a Confederate’: Loyalty and Dissent in Civil War Era Rapides Parish, Louisiana,” Civil War History 63, no. 1 (2017): 36-67.
- New Politics in the Old South: Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016).
- “‘A Public Problem… Rather Than a Question of Social Welfare’: Ernest F. Hollings and the Politics of Hunger,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 8, no. 1 (2015): 75-98. Available online at DOI: 10.1080/17541328.2015.1033834
- “Managing the Backlash: Senator Ernest F. ‘Fritz’ Hollings and the Marshall and Fortas Supreme Court Nominations,” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (2013): 19-28.
Book Reviews
- Participant in “A Discussion on the State and Future of Reconstruction, ANCH Book Reviews,” July 2019, available online at https://bit.ly/2RQZ9SF.
- Review of Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker (eds.), Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America’s Most Turbulent Era. In American Nineteenth Century History 20, no. 1 (2019): 79-81.
- Review of Russell Brooker, The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865-1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will. In Journal of Southern History 84, no. 3 (2018): 771-773.
- Review of Frederickson, Kari A., Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South. H-USA, H-Net Reviews. October, 2015, available online at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41854.
- Review of Wheeler, Jan Bates, A Campaign of Quiet Persuasion: How the College Board Desegregated SAT® Test Centers in the Deep South, 1960-1965. H-USA, H-Net Reviews. November, 2014, available online at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41853.
School of Humanities
Chancellor's Building
Keele University
Staffordshire
ST5 5AA
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 733109
Head of School
Dr Nick Seager
Room: CBB1.038 (Chancellor's Building, 'B' Extension)
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 733142
Email: n.p.seager@keele.ac.uk
School and college outreach
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 734009
Email: outreach@keele.ac.uk