About the Host

American History Untucked is hosted by David Silkenat (me).

I'm a lecturer (UK equivalent of an assistant professor) at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I teach classes on 19th century American History, focusing on the American South, slavery, and the Civil War.

Prior to teaching at the University of Edinburgh, I taught for five years at North Dakota State University. I received my Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and my undergraduate degree from Duke.  After college and before graduate school, I spent 4 years teaching at Jacksonville Episcopal High School.

I'm probably best known in academic circles for a book I published with UNC Press in 2011 called Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina, which won the North Caroliniana Society award for the best non-fiction book published that year. It recently came out in paperback, so buy a copy -- it's not as depressing as the title suggests.

Welcome to American History Untucked

This blog is the companion site for the American History Untucked podcast.

The show is a conversation about and by American history and American historians. It’s not really an interview show – it’s a conversation:  casual, personal, informal, spontaneous. It’s about history, but it’s also about the historian’s background, their experiences, what they’ve learned doing history. It’s about time in the archives, about the writing process, about teaching, doing public history, engaging with all different kinds of audiences. It’s about American historians broadly defined – mostly academic historians, but also archivists, public historians, documentary film makers, and historians outside the ivory tower. It’s about what makes history interesting to us and how we try to share that with our readers, students, and other audiences. 

We're hoping to have our first few episodes up by mid-April 2014. Stay tuned.