Event

Michael A. Blaakman is an associate professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. A scholar of the revolutionary and early national eras, he focuses on the histories of politics, political economy, borderlands, and empires. His first book, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (Penn Press, 2023), chronicles the real-estate bonanza that swept the new United States and explores the relationships between finance, Native dispossession, and the U.S. founding. Speculation Nation received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians as well as the Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History, and it was a finalist for the George Washington Prize. Blaakman is also a co-editor of The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.–Mexican War (Penn Press, 2023), which grew out of a 2019 conference co-hosted by the McNeil Center and the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in Early American Economy and Society. He was an MCEAS Advisory Council Dissertation Fellow in 2013-14.

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