Howell Keiser is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School. Keiser is an American Historian of the nineteenth-century United States, with a focus on the Civil War Era, the U.S. South, and slavery. He previously served as the Editor of the Civil War Book Review and taught at the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia. His current research focuses on political and economic thought in the antebellum South. His writing has appeared in several journals, including Civil War History, American Nineteenth-Century History, and The Simms Review. He is also a contributor to RealClear History and the Emerging Civil War.
Keiser is currently completing first book, The Dismal Science of Union: Proslavery Malthusianism and the Coming Civil War. This project examines how the political economies of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo informed Southern economic thought and practice during the sectional crisis. Rather than abandoning political economy as a tool of free labor, slaveholding Southerners proved remarkably adept at adapting these theories to justify their own vision for man, society, and resources. Malthus and Ricardo emerged as their “new savants.”
“Demographic Theory and the Movement to Reopen the African Slave Trade,” American Nineteenth-Century History (forthcoming, 2025).
“Black Geographies, White Anxieties: Maroons, Population Control, and Resource Competition in the Antebellum South,” Civil War History, vol. 71, no. 1 (March 2025): 73-99.
“An Aristocratic Hero: William Gilmore Simms & Proslavery Political Economy,” The Simms Review, vol. 31, no. 1-2 (Fall 2024): 1-19.
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