ELLEN HARTIGAN-O'CONNOR
Books
America Under the Hammer
As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism.
In contrast to histories focused on banks, currencies, or plantations, America Under the Hammer highlights an institution that integrated market, community, and household in ways that put gender, race, and social bonds at the center of ideas about economic worth. Women and men, enslaved and free, are active participants in this story rather than bystanders, and their labor, judgments, and bodies define the resulting contours of the American economy.
The Ties That Buy
​​
​
​In the years between 1750 and 1820, women were quintessential market participants, with fluid occupational identities, cross-class social and economic connections, and a firm investment in cash and commercial goods for power and meaning.Commerce reached into every part of life in North American port cities. At the hearths of multifamily homes, renters, lodgers, and recent acquaintances lived together and struck financial deals for survival. Landladies, enslaved washerwomen, shopkeepers, and hucksters sustained themselves by serving the mobile population. A new economic practice in America—shopping—mobilized hierarchical and friendly relationships into wide-ranging consumer networks that depended on these same market connections.
The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History
The cover image of The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History is a photograph taken by Louise Rosskam of a seamstress in a U.S. doll factory in Puerto Rico in the 1940s. The production of the photo and the questions that the image raises about work, class, race, and consumption highlight the problem of who gets included in American women's history.
Inside this volume, 32 scholars explore the borders and contours of the lives of people who lived as women in North America and the United States from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries. From the first European encounters with Native American women to today's crisis of sexual assault, The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History boldly interprets the diverse history of women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America.​
Global Americans vol 1 & vol 2
How do you tell the history of North America and the United States in global perspective? My co-authors and I focused on connections, comparisons, and consequences to understand the dynamics that shaped politics, culture, and human lives over centuries. Native American prophets, Chilean miners, Ukrainian labor organizers, Vietnamese authors joined millions of people whose physical and cultural migrations changed the course of history.
Global Americans is an introduction to the sweeping history of United States and a model of how Americans can understand that their lives today are products of the past, but this past was filled with contingency, struggle, and paths not taken.
