am interested in the processes by which the United States political regime was invented, reinvented, ruptured and re-created over the long era of the Revolution and Founding through the Civil War and Reconstruction and the ways in which the traumas of slavery, race and war--and the representations of those traumas--shaped those dramas of creative destruction. My recent research and book project have focused on the coming of the Civil War: that book locates the origins of the war in the eruption of national democratic movements in the years leading up to 1861 (see Stripes & Scars: Race, The Revitalization of America and The Origins of the Civil War, under contract with Oxford University Press, above). I am especially concerned, in this context, with the attachments, alliances and convergences between and among slaves, fugitive slaves and quasi-free blacks, and usually white collaborators of various kinds, from individuals to nation-states, and the roles they have performed in stabilizing or destabilizing old regimes and creating new nationalisms and political orders. My book explains how and why such outsiders came to play a pivotal role in the advent of the Civil War, foregrounding the traumatic politics of boundary violation and debasement as a foundational field of struggle. In so doing the book recasts the governing narrative of the war’s origins and significance. It also re-examines core assumptions about the Founders’ Republic/early US empire, antebellum US slavery, the meaning of freedom and the construction of history in the era before slave emancipation.