Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935.

This project examines the riot that exploded in Harlem in 1935, the first example of a new pattern of racial violence that recurred throughout the twentieth century, one centered not on interracial attacks but also directed at property and the police, and contained in black districts. Originating in the Year of the Riot project (a collaboration with Shane White and Stephen Garton), Harlem in Disorder builds on the award-winning Digital Harlem website to map the disorder and develop an innovative spatial analysis as an interpretive key to understanding such violence. The analysis is structured as a multi-layered, hyperlinked argument using the Scalar platform. Each layer offers a different scale of analysis: broad narratives, aggregated patterns, and individual events. Scalar allows these layers to be connected by tags which are not simply labels for categories of which the page is part or which it encompasses but links to pages. As such, tags can be used to describe as well as gather categories of information, providing an intermediary layer of pages between individual events and narratives and contexts.

• The creation of the Scalar publication is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication for 2021-2022. Harlem in Disorder is under contract to be published by Stanford University Press in its Digital Projects series.

Disagreeable Detective Work: Private Investigation in the US from the Civil War until WW2

This project tells the story of how for six decades beginning in the 1870s private detectives conducted investigations that reached into American workplaces, leisure activities, and homes. They operated as a de facto national police force, filling a gap in policing services at the state and federal level that existed until the expansion of the FBI in the 1930s. Railroad corporations hired them for investigations of train robbery, and later banks and jewelers retained them to investigate robbery, theft, and burglary, and local police and prosecutors turned to them in cases of murder, bombing, and kidnapping. Business owners employed those same detectives to conduct surveillance in workplaces and to infiltrate radical political groups and labour unions, a practice that ended only after attention from a Congressional committee in the late 1930s. Private organizations tasked investigators with locating the illegal liquor sales, gambling, and prostitution, while individuals set them to watch suspected adulterers.

This project will be the first study to bring together all the activities of private detectives so that they can shed light on each other. When taken together, they reveal personal surveillance of a far larger scale and broader scope than has been recognized. I also extend those analyses by focusing on the practices of private investigation not just its subjects.