Samuel Schaffer
Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Associate
Office: 370 Temple St, Room 407
Phone: (203) 432-9205
Email: samuel.schaffer@yale.edu
Sam Schaffer is the Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Associate, affiliated with the Yale University History Department and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He received his B.A. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997 and his Ph.D. in history from Yale in 2010.
His manuscript, New South Nation: Woodrow Wilson’s Generation and the Rise of the South, 1880-1920, traces how the generation of white southern men born during the Civil War returned the South to national power in the early twentieth century. Reared during the turmoil of Reconstruction, these men—including among others, Woodrow Wilson, Josephus Daniels, Walter Hines Page, William G. McAdoo, and Thomas Dixon—first ushered in a New South through a program of political progressivism buttressed by racial conservatism. When the southern-born Wilson became President in 1912, they joined him in Washington as his Cabinet members, his diplomats, and his allies in Congress. New South Nation illustrates important connections between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, southern progressivism and national politics, the Civil War and World War I, and the Reconstruction of the South and the reconstruction of Europe. It convenes themes of race and reform, culture and power, and regional and national identity in a single narrative.
He has delivered papers at the annual meetings of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association, and reviewed books for the Journal of Southern History and H-Net Reviews.
Schaffer’s teaching interests span from both halves of the American survey to courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Old and New South, American nationalism, and historical memory. At Yale, he has taught research seminars entitled “Civil War Memory” and “Nationalism in American Politics and Culture,” and served at the Graduate Teaching Center—for two years as a Fellow and two years as Coordinator—facilitating workshops to help graduate students become better teachers. He was awarded the Prize Teaching Fellowship in 2011by Yale undergraduates and the Yale Graduate School.
Born and bred in Atlanta, Schaffer taught history and coached football and basketball at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., for six years before coming to Yale.
