Faculty Experts Guide

History

Professor of history

Specialties:

U.S. South, 19th century U.S. history, Civil War and Reconstruction, history museums, popular music before 1965

Bio:

John Schlotterbeck is a social historian interested in the everyday lives of ordinary people in the United States. This is reflected in his scholarship and courses in which he examines how common people shaped the past even as their lives were constrained by larger economic, political, and social forces and events. He is series editor of Daily Life in the Colonial South, Daily Life in the United States Series, which describes how Native Americans, Europeans and Africans created new societies in the South Atlantic from initial European contacts in the early 1500s to the eve of the American Revolution in the 1760s.

Schlotterbeck’s other research shares the same interest in other times and places. He is completing a manuscript, The ‘Chosen People of God’: Rural Society and Culture in Central Virginia, 1714 to 1902, which examines creation and re-creation of community across two centuries. He is collaborating with a University archivist and a DePauw student to edit the Civil War diary of Col. James Riley Weaver, 1863-65, while he was a cavalry officer and POW in Confederate prisons. He also is writing a biography of John Jackson (1924-2002), a Piedmont Virginia Songster, as a window on black expressive culture in 20th century Virginia and the shift of blues music from black to white audiences.

He teaches courses about the history of race and race-making; history of families and communities; popular music before 1965; material culture, museums and memory; the Black Atlantic Civil War; Civil War and Reconstruction; and surveys of U.S. history to 1900.