“Spirited Struggles: The Black Temperance Movement in Nineteenth-Century America”
Mackenzie is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Missouri. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History & Italian from Providence College and earned her M.A. in History from University of Missouri. Mackenzie’s research focuses broadly on nineteenth-century reform movements, African American intellectual history, and American political culture. Her dissertation utilizes race as a lens to view the temperance movement, specifically tracing the evolution of Black Americans’ participation in the cause. Through carefully considering how ideas about alcohol, slavery, race, and citizenship intersected beginning in the Early Republic, Mackenzie demonstrates how teetotalism came to be seen as a legitimate way for Black reformers to assert their belonging and their own republican values—independence, religiosity, and civic responsibility—in the face of denigrating racial theories stemming from the proliferation of slavery. Thus, she argues that temperance was a reform that held a distinct transformative potential for Black men and women in the long nineteenth-century United States.
Her research has been supported by organizations such as the American Antiquarian Society, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. In addition to her personal scholarship, Mackenzie enjoys collaborating with her colleagues on scholarly, public-oriented projects, including the University of Missouri’s Haskell Monroe Collection website and a documentary film on the career of Senegalese artist Younousse Seye.
For more information about Mackenzie Tor, read her Fellow Profile.