Professor Emeritus
James L. Huston

Vita

• Education
  • B.A., Denison University (Granville, Ohio), 1969 (History)
  • A.M., University of Illinois, 1974 (History)
  • Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1980 (History)
  • Dissertation: "The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War"—Director: Robert W. Johannsen
• Academic Life

  • 1972-1980 Graduate Student, University of Illinois

  • 1980-2019 Courses Taught at Oklahoma State University: American survey (lower division), a one-semester overview of American history, American urban history, American labor history, Civil War and Reconstruction, American Economic History, undergraduate historiography, graduate reading and research seminars in political and economic history.
  • 1980-83 Appointed Visiting Assistant Professor.
  • 1983 Appointed Assistant Professor.
  • 1988 Promoted to Associate Professor
  • 1994 Finalist for Regents Teaching Award
  • 1998 Promoted to Professor of History.
  • 2006 Promoted to Regents Professor
  • 2010 Awarded Regents Distinguished Research Award
  • 2014 Finalist for Regents Teaching Award
  • 2018 Finalist for Eminent Faculty Award
  • 2019 Retired from Oklahoma State University
• Areas of Teaching Competence
  • Survey of American History
  • Civil War and Reconstruction
  • American Economic History
• Graduate Students

  M.A.

  • Holly N. Brown, 1997. Thesis: “The Worcester Women’s Rights Convention of 1850: A Social Analysis of the Rank-and-File Membership.”

  • Mark A. Furnish, 2004. Thesis: “A Southern Man of Northern Principles: Michael C. Garber and the Political Realignment of the 1850s.”
  • James R. Dailey. 2004. Research Paper: “Evaluating Economic  Implications in the Union’s New Paper Currency and Securities Resulting from the Legal Tender Acts and the National Banking Act for the Year 1862 and 1863.”
  • Andy Lui. 2006. Thesis: “Small Business in the United States: A Field Study of Three Chinese Restaurants in Midland, Texas.”
  • Michael J. Mahoney. 2009. Thesis: “Beyond the Capacity of Any Man: Christopher Gustavus Memminger and the Financial Programs of the Confederate States of America.”
  • P. Aaron Bolerjack. 2010. Thesis: “A Southern Illinois Farmer Goes to War: Sgt. William S. Bolerjack and the 29th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, July 1861 - January 1863.”
  • Andrew Benjamin Smith. 2011. “American Pacifists: The Quakers, the Disciples of Christ, and the Civil War.”
  • Cecilia M. Brooks, 2014. "Driving Black America: Melvin Jackson Chisum, African American Kingmaker.”

  Ph.D.

  • Robert Steven Jones, 1997. Thesis: “The Right Hand of Command: Use and Disuse of Personal Staffs in the American Civil War.”
  • Leslie Ray Tucker, 2001. Thesis: “Major General Isaac Ridgeway Trimble, CSA: The Individual and His Community.”
  • James William Cummings, 2003. Thesis: “The Independent Treasury and Mexican War Financing.”
  • Lisa G. Guinn, 2003. Thesis: “Building Useful Women from the Depths of Poverty: A Social History of the Girl’s Industrial Home and School in St. Louis, Missouri, 1853-1935.”
  • Steven L. Kite. 2003. Thesis: “After the Fall: Radicalism and Reform on the Great Plains, 1896-1923.”
  • Jeremy J. Tewell. 2010. A Self-Evident Lie: Southern Slavery and the Erosion of American Freedom.”
  • Tom L. Franzmann. 2010. “The Politics of Race in a Free and a Slave Society: The Ohio and Tennessee Legislatures in Antebellum Times.”
  • Kristin Morgan. 2013. “Establishing the Order: Forming an American Common Law in Louisiana, Missouri, and New Mexico Territories.” (Co-chair.)
  • Bryan Anthony Carter. 2014. “The Reluctant Frontier: Identity, Loyalty, and the Coming of the Civil War on the Pacific Coast.
  • Zachary S. Daughtrey. 2016. “The South’s Visible Hand: Textile Mills and the Control of White Labor in the Antebellum Southern Piedmont, 1830-1860.”
  • Cecilia M. Brooks. 2018. “Chisum’s Pilgrimage II:  Melvin Jackson Chisum, Sr., Louis Harlan's 'Spy’ Unraveled in Biography 1873-1945.”
• Service: Teaching Material Produced

  • 1990 Themes Through Time: An American History Reader. Coedited with William S. Bryans and Ronald A. Petrin. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 1990.

  • 1993 Themes Through Time: An American History Reader. Coedited with William S. Bryans and Ronald A. Petrin. 2d ed. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 1993.
  • 1995 American Passages: A U. S. History Reader. Coedited with William S. Bryans and Ronald A. Petrin.  Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 1995.
  • 1997 American Passages: A U. S. History Reader. Coedited with William S. Bryans, Michael F. Logan, and Ronald A. Petrin.  2d ed.  Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 1997.
  • 1999 Journeys Through U.S. History: A U.S. History Reader.  Coedited with William S. Bryans, Michael F. Logan, and Ronald A. Petrin.  New York: Forbes, 1999.
  • 2000 Visions of America’s Heritage: Readings in United States History.  Coedited with William S. Bryans, Michael F. Logan, and Ronald A. Petrin.  New York: Thompson, 2000.
  • 2002 Visions of America’s Heritage: Readings in United States History.  Coedited with William S. Bryans, Michael F. Logan, and Ronald A. Petrin.  New York: Thompson, 2000.
  • 2002 Workbook for History 1103.  Coedited with William S. Bryans, James F. Cooper, and Ronald A. Petrin. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002.
  • 2003-2019 Huston’s Workbook for History 1103.
• Public Addresses

  • “Property Rights and Southern Secession.” Address given at the University of Tulsa, January 23, 1998.

  • “Distribution Theories: The Nineteenth Century vs. The Twentieth.” Address given to the Department of Economics and Legal Studies in Business Workshop, September 18, 1998, Oklahoma State University.
  • “Distribution Theory With and Without Equality: The Nineteenth Century vs. The Twentieth.” Annual DeSantis Lecture, University of Notre Dame, March 15, 1999.
  • “A Whole Lot of Outlining.” Address given to Stillwater Arts and Humanities Writers Conference, June 12, 1999, Stillwater, Oklahoma.
  • “The American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth.” Public address given at the Edmon Low Library, Oklahoma State University, April 13, 2000.
  • “Southern Calculation and Northern Emotions: How the War Came.” Paper given at the Library of Congress Civil War Symposium, November 13, 2002.
  • Invited for informal presentation at the Civil War seminar of Prof. Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia, March 24, 2004.
  • Invited to East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma, Colloquium, as part of the Center for the Advancement of American History Instruction, January 11-12, 2005. Gave address, “The Economic Power of Slavery and American Sectional Conflict,” and “Strategies for Teaching Economic History in the Schools.”
  • Invited by the History Department, University of Calgary, Canada, to give two papers, April 8, 9, 2005. The papers were: “Calculating the Value of the Union: Rethinking the American Civil War,” and “The 2004 Elections and U. S. Political History.”
  • One of three participants in a round-table discussion of “Church and State” sponsored by the Progressive Interfaith Coalition, 505 EN, Oklahoma State University, April 21, 2005.
  • Presented an address, “Labor’s Fate, Labor’s Future,” at the annual state convention of the Oklahoma Association of Letter Carriers, Best Western Motel, Stillwater, OK, on April 23, 2005.
  • Presented an address, “A Different View of American Economic Development, 1840-1960: The Civil War and the Suffering South,” at a Brown-Bag Seminar, University of Oklahoma Department of History, Nov. 29, 2006.
  • Keynote speaker, Stephen A. Douglas Symposium: From Quincy to Congress. “Winning the Battles While Losing the War: Stephen A. Douglas’s Reputation in History.” Quincy Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, Quincy University, April 19, 2008.
  • Presenting address at the Civil War Sesquicentennial Commemoration, Tulsa Community College, Tulsa, OK, April 1, 2010. “The Economic Differences Between North and South: Where Do They Lie?”
  • Presented five lectures in connection with “The Meaning of the Civil War,” a class of five sessions offered by the Oklahoma Humanities Council, Fall 2012.
  • Presented “The Abolitionist Imperfection and Its Consequences,” at Oklahoma History Center, June 19, 2014.
• Publications

  Book Reviews

  • Over 50 reviews in journals such as American Historical Review, Civil War History, Journal of Southern History, Journal of American History, Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of the Early Republic.

  Articles

  • "The Threat of Radicalism:  Seward's Candidacy and the Rhode Island Gubernatorial Election of 1860." Rhode Island History, 41 (August, 1982), 86-99.

  • "Facing an Angry Labor:  The American Public Interprets the Shoemakers' Strike of 1860." Civil War History, 28 (September, 1982), 197-212.

  • "The Panic of 1857, Southern Economic Thought, and the Patriarchal Defense of Slavery." Historian, 46 (February, 1984), 163-186.

  • "Western Grains and the Panic of 1857."  Agricultural History, 57 (January, 1983), 14-32.

  • "Abolitionists and an Errant Economy:  The Panic of 1857 and Abolitionist Economic Ideas."  Mid-America, 65 (1983), 15-27.

  • "A Political Response to Industrialism:  The Republican Embrace of Protectionist Labor Doctrines."  Journal of American History, 70 (June, 1983), 35-57.

  • "The Demise of the Pennsylvania American Party, 1854-1858."  Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 109 (October, 1985), 473-497.

  • "Economic Change and Political Realignment in Antebellum Pennsylvania."  Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 113 (July, 1989), 347-395.

  • "The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse."  Journal of Southern History, 56 (November, 1990), 609-640.

  • "Continuities in Support for Korean Political Parties: An Ecological Analysis 1981-1985."  With Robert Darcy; Hyun, Chong-Min; and Kim, Hyun-Woo.  World Conference of Korean Political Studies, Korean Political Science Association, 1989, pp. 155-165.

  • "Weighting, Confidence Intervals, and Ecological Regression."  Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 21 (Spring, 1991), 631-654.

  • "Missing Links?  Evangelicalism and Antislavery."  Reviews in American History, 19 (December, 1991), 492-98.

  • "The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765-1900."  American Historical Review, 98 (October, 1993), 1079-1105.

  • "Virtue Besieged: Virtue, Equality, and the General Welfare in the Tariff Debates of the 1820s." Journal of the Early Republic, 14 (Winter, 1994), 523-47.

  • “Testing the Accuracy of Ecological Regression Estimates by Computer Simulation.”  Historical Methods, 30 (Summer, 1997), 117-36.

  • “Democracy By Scripture vs. Democracy By Process; A Reflection on Stephen A. Douglas and Popular Sovereignty.”  Civil War History, XLIII (September, 1997), 189-200.

  • “Property Rights and the Coming of the Civil War.”  Journal of Southern History, 65 (May, 1999), 249-86.

  • “Southerners Against Secession: The Arguments of the Southern Constitutional Unionists, 1850-1851.”  Civil War History, XVI (December, 2000), 281-99.

  • “Abolitionists, Political Economists, and Capitalism.”  Journal of the Early Republic, 20 (Fall, 2000), 487-521.

  • “Putting the African American in the Center of National Political Discourse: The Strange Fate of the Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty.”  Politics and Culture of the Civil War Era: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Johannsen.  Edited by Daniel McDonough and Kenneth W. Noe. Selingsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2006, pp. 96-126.

  • “Economic Landscapes Yet to Be Discovered: The Early American Republic and Historians’ Unsubtle Adoption of Political Economy.”  Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer, 2004), 219-31.

  • “Reconstruction as It Should Have Been: An Exercise in Counterfactual History.”  Civil War History, 51 (December 2005), 358-63.

  • “An Alternative to the Tragic Era: Applying the Virtues of Bureaucracy to the Reconstruction Dilemma.” Civil War History, 51 (December 2005), 403-15.

  • “Economic Landscapes Yet to Be Discovered: The Early American Republic and Historians’ Unsubtle Adoption of Political Economy. In Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field. Edited by Michael Morrison and John Larson.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, pp. 69-81

  • “Response 1: ‘For We Had Hugged the Delusion:’ Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 5 (July 2006), 37-43.

  • “Interpreting the Causation Sequence: The Meaning of Events Leading to the Civil War: Review of Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War.”  Reviews in American History, 34 (September 2006), 324-31.

  •  “Theory’s Failure: Malthusian Population Theory and the Projected Demise of Slavery.” Civil War History, 55 (September 2009), 354-81.

  •  “Model Defects: A Review of Bruce Laurie’s ‘Workers, Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective.’” In Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, V (Winter, 2008), 57-64.

  • “The Illinois Political Realignment of 1844-1860: Revisiting the Analysis.”  Journal of the Civil War Era, 1 (December 2011), 506-35.

  • “The Pregnant Economies of the Border South, 1840-1860: Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Possibilities of Slave Labor Expansion.”  Chapter 9 in L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers, eds., The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress,   New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.120-41.

  • “The Lost Cause of the North: A Reflection on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural.”  Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association., 33 (Winter 2012), 14-37.

  • “The 1860 Southern Sojourns of Stephen A. Douglas and the Irrepressible Separation.”  In A. James Fuller, ed., The Election of 1860 Reconsidered, pp. 29-67.  Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013.

  • “James Buchanan, the Slavocracy, and the Disruption of the Democratic Party.”  Chapter to be published in Joel H. Silbey, ed., A Companion to Antebellum Presidents, pp.421-45.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2013.

  • “Did the Tug Have to Come? A Critique of the New Revisionism of the Secession Winter.”  Civil War History, 62 (September 2016), 247-83.

  • “Slavery, Capitalism, and the Interpretations of the Antebellum United States: The Problem of Definition.”  Civil War History, 65 (June 2019), 119-56.

  • “Northern US Agriculture, the Distribution of Income, and the Economic Growth of The United States in the Nineteenth Century.” Agricultural History, 95 (Spring 2021), 212-44.

  • “Early National America, 1789-1830: Laying the Foundation for Nineteenth-Century Agricultural Growth.”  In A Companion to American Agricultural History, pp. 37-46. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt.  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2022.

  Edited Works

  • The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. Edited by Robert W. Johannsen and James L. Huston.  2nd ed.  New York: Oxford University Press, c. 2008.  (Wrote the introductory essay, “The Continuing Debate About the‘ Great Debates’ of 1858: A Critical Review of the Literature.”)

  Books and Monographs

  • The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War.  Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
  • Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900.  Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
  • Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
  • Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemma of Democratic Equality.  Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
  • The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America.  Baton Rouge: 
    Louisiana State University Press, 2015.
  • The American and British Debate over Equality, 1776-1920.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2017.
• Honors and Awards

  • Received Honorable Mention in the Carstensen Prize Competition for 1983 for article "Western Grains and the Panic of 1857" in Agricultural History.

  • Received Best Book award for an author's first book from Phi Alpha Theta (History Honorary), April 1989, for The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War.

  • Securing the Fruits of Labor selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1998.  Published in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, January 1999.

  • Finalist for Oklahoma Book Award for 1998, Nonfiction category, for Securing the Fruits of Labor.

  • Main presenter on the topic of the origins of the civil war at the Library of Congress Symposium on the Civil War, November 13, 2002.

  • Finalist for the 2004 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, awarded by the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War, Shepherd College, for Calculating the Value of the Union.

  • Promoted to Regents Professor, 2006.

  • Awarded the Oklahoma State University Regents Distinguished Research Award, 2010.

• Other Professional Activities

  • Coordinated the Nineteenth Annual Mid-America Conference on History, Stillwater, Oklahoma, September 18-20, 1997.

  • Coordinator for the Twenty-Third Annual Mid-America Conference on History, Stillwater, Oklahoma, September 20-21, 2001.

  • Network coordinator for the politics network of the Social Science History Association, October, 2001-2003.

  • Primary coordinator for the Twenty-Ninth Annual Mid-America Conference on History, Tulsa, Oklahoma, September 27-29, 2007.

  • Chair of the Program Committee, Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, 2009.