Expertise
US History, African American History, Nineteenth Century History, US Political History, US Civil War
Biography
Andrew Diemer is a scholar of African American History and of the Nineteenth Century United States. He received his BA with honors in history from Williams College. After receiving his PhD from Temple, he taught at Towson University for fourteen years before returning to Temple.
His scholarship has focused on free African Americans and the antislavery movement in the United States. He is author of The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016 and Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2022.
He is currently working on a book about the mid-term election of 1858, the backlash to the Dred Scott Decision, and the coming of the US Civil War.
Selected Publications
- “The Varieties of Free State Slavery,” Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 2025)
- Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022)
- “The Business of the Road: William Still, the Vigilance Committee, and the Management of the Underground Railroad,” Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2022) – winner of the Ralph D. Gray Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
- “’Agitation, tumult, violence will not cease’: Black Politics and the Compromise of 1850,” Emancipations, Reconstructions, and Revolutions: African American Politics and U.S. History from the First to the Second Civil War, eds. Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
- The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016)
Courses Taught
- Intermediate Writing Seminar