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Rachel N. Klein

Professor and Academic Senate Distinguished Teacher

Rachel N. Klein teaches courses in U.S. cultural history from the 18th through the 19th centuries. She was educated at Wesleyan University (BA) and at Yale University (Ph.D.) Her past research and publications dealt with the American South and the politics of slavery during the Revolutionary and Early National Eras. More recently, her research has focused on 19th century art institutions and the changing meanings of art exhibition.

  • HILD 2B: U.S. History Survey: The Nineteenth Century (Lower Division)
  • HILD 7B: Race and Ethnicity in the United States: African-American History (Lower Division)
  • HIUS 130: U.S. Cultural History, 1765-1860 (Upper Division Lecture
  • HILD 7B: Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. (Lower Division)
  • HIUS 130: U.S. Cultural History, 1765-1865 (Upper Division)
  • HIUS 131: U.S. Cultural History, 1865-1914 (Upper Division)
  • HIUS 188: Topics in American History: The First American Gilded Age (Upper Division Seminar)
  • HIGR 265B: Historiography of the 19th Century United States (Graduate Seminar)
  • HIGR 250: Graduate Research Seminar
  • Huntington Library Fellowship, Fall 2011
  • Mellon Short-Term Fellowship, Huntington Library, Winter-Spring, 2009
  • Francis Butler Simkins Award, Co-winner, 1991 Southern Historical Association
  • Willie Lee Rose Prize, 1991 Southern Association of Women Historians
  • President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, 1992
  • Fellowship, Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979-1981

Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Ninteenth Century New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, Spring 2020)

Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1990)

“Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Domestication of Free Labor Ideology, Legacy, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2001)

“Art Museums and Public Life in Historical Perspective” Intellectual History Newsletter Vol. 23 (2001)

“Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City: The Rise and Fall of the American Art-Union,” Journal of American History (March 1995)

"Frontier Planters and the American Revolution: The South Carolina Backcountry, 1775-1782" in An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry During the American Revolution, edited by Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1985)

Reprinted in Paul D. Escott and David R. Goldfield, Major Problems in the History of the American South, Volume I: The Old South (Lexington, Mass., DC Heath and Co., 1990)

“Ordering the Backcountry: The South Carolina Regulation” William and Mary Quarterly (Oct, 1981)