Courses

Michael J. Douma

Director, Georgetown institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics

Georgetown University

Michael J. Douma is an Assistant Research Professor at Georgetown University, and the Director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets at Ethics, in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
Most of his published work deals with 19th and 20th century American history, and with topics of race and ethnicity, immigration, and folk and material culture. His next book, titled Creative Historical Thinking, will be published by Routledge in early 2018.

Blog Posts

The bell curve of anti-slavery

February 19, 2017
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History

For years, I’ve read essays in which students seem to think that on the eve of the American Civil War all people were either abolitionists or slaveholders. But abolitionists and slave-holders were actually at the far ends of the bell curve of the United States’ population. Most Americans occupied an ambiguous middle, between pro-slave and anti-slave views, but not necessarily owning slaves or calling for outright abolition. In fact, during the 1850s, the real debate was about curtailing the expansion of slavery, not ending it in the near term. Abolitionism is one of the complex historical