Steven Deyle
Associate Professor (19^th c. U.S., Slavery)
539 Agnes Arnold Hall
(713) 743-3104
shdeyle@uh.edu

Steven Deyle specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. social and political history, with a particular interest in slavery and the Old South.  He received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.  He came to the University of Houston in 2006.

Teaching:
Professor Deyle has taught a variety of courses in U.S. history, including, at the undergraduate level, both halves of the survey, Jacksonian America, Civil War and Reconstruction, Nineteenth-Century Political History, Slavery and American Society, and Social Reform Movements in Antebellum America.  He has also taught a number of courses at the graduate level in nineteenth-century American history.

Research:
Professor Deyle’s first book Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2005), examines both the fundamentals of the domestic slave trade, or the buying and selling of American-born slaves, and the larger impact that it had on American society.  It was the 2005 winner of Southern Historical Association’s Bennett H. Wall Award for the best book on southern business or economic history published within the previous two years.  It was also nominated by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition as one of three finalists for the society’s annual Frederick Douglass Prize.

Professor Deyle is also the author of several scholarly articles and book reviews.  He is currently working on a new project that examines an unreported 1853 court case that involved the torture and murder of a Louisiana slave by his overseer.  He believes that this unique case can tell us much about the complex nature of crime and punishment in the antebellum South, as well as expose some of the social strains within that society.

Selected Publications:
Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford University Press, 2005).

"The Domestic Slave Trade in America: The Lifeblood of the Southern Slave System," in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Yale University Press, 2005), 91-116.

"The Irony of Liberty: The Origins of the Domestic Slave Trade," Journal of the Early Republic, 12 (Spring 1992), 37-62.

"'By farr the most profitable trade': Slave Trading in British Colonial North America," Slavery & Abolition, 10 (September 1989), 107-25.

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