About

I am Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University. You can contact me at wcaleb AT rice DOT edu.

My latest book, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. It was supported by a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History and the Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award from the Organization of American Historians.

My first book, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, won the Merle Curti prize from the Organization of American Historians and the James Broussard Prize from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.

From 2019 to 2023, I served as co-chair of the Rice University Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice.

In addition to numerous academic articles about the history of slavery, antislavery, and emancipation in the nineteenth century, I have written essays, reviews, and blog posts that have appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and TIME.

I am also the creator or co-creator of several digital humanities projects, including @Every3Minutes and the Harvey Memories Project. I am a past member of the editorial team for The Programming Historian, and I created the Syllabus Maker to help professors generate dates for a course.

You can view my full curriculum vitae as a PDF.

Representation: The Strothman Agency