Honor Sachs
Visiting Professor
Office Hours: By appointment and posted
Phone: 843.953.3045
E-mail: sachshr@cofc.edu
Honor Sachs holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on the history of early America with particular interests in the study of race, gender and legal culture. Her first book, Home Rule: Households and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (Yale University Press, forthcoming) examines state-building in the early national West from the perspective of households, families and social relations.
Her publication "Freedom By A Judgment: The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family", follows a trail of law suits initiated by an extended family of slaves claiming freedom through Indian ancestry in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. (Law and History Review Vol.30 Issue 01 pp 173-203)
Before coming to the College of Charleston, Professor Sachs was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and taught courses on Colonial America, Legal and Constitutional History, and Early U.S. Women's History at Southern Connecticut State and The New School.
Education
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.A. Dartmouth College
Research Interests
Early American History, Gender and Race, Law and Legal Culture, Slavery and Atlantic Empires
Courses Taught
History 116: Slavery, Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World
History 224: Southern History Before the Civil War
History 410: American Genealogies: Families and Politics Before the Civil War
Honors and Awards
Selected fellowships:
Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship, Howard Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, History Department, Yale University.
Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History, American Society for Legal History/Institute for Legal Studies, University of Wisconsin – Madison
J. Willard Hurst Fellowship in Legal History, Institute for Legal Studies, University of Wisconsin Law School
Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellow, American Antiquarian Society
University Dissertation Fellowship, Graduate School, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Publications
Selected publications:
Home Rule: Households and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (under contract, Yale University Press)
"Freedom By A Judgment: The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family" Law and History Review 2012 Vol.30 (01) 173-203.
“Reconstructing a Life: The Archival Challenges of Women’s History,” invited article for a special issue on “Alternative Print Culture: Social History and Libraries,” Library Trends 2008 (56) 650-666.
“The Myth of the Abandoned Wife: Married Women’s Agency and the Legal Narrative of
Gender in Eighteenth-Century Kentucky,” Ohio Valley History 2003 (3) 4: 3-20.
