TERP YOUNG SCHOLARS
HIST152: Slavery, Law & Power in Early America and the British Empire
About this Course
A hands-on history course that helps students understand how historical research is done and to do it themselves. In a world of misinformation and disinformation, it is more important than ever to understand how we make judgments about the past and how we discover and analyze it. Questions of Slavery, Law, and Power in the Early Americas and the British Empire are at the core of this class, and so is the research process itself.
Course Highlights
- Field trip — Smithsonian NMAAHC Visit the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C.
- Field trip — Library of Congress Explore primary source collections at one of the world’s great research libraries.
- Paid internship opportunity Some participants will be eligible for paid internships during the 2026–27 academic year.
Schedule & Format
| Dates | July 13 – July 31, 2026 |
| Time | 9:00 AM – 12:00 Noon, weekdays |
| Format | On campus — UMD College Park |
| Credits | 3 college credits |
Program Fee
$1,791
Campus tuition for the 3-week program
Scholarship available
Apply & Learn more
Location
University of Maryland
College Park, MD
Lead Instructor
Dr. Michael Becker
Assistant Research Scholar at the University of Maryland College Park
Project Manager & Associate Editor
Dr. Michael Becker is Assistant Research Scholar at the University of Maryland College Park, as well as project manager and associate editor for the Slavery, Law, and Power Project. His scholarship broadly focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British and French Caribbean, with particular interests in enslaved people’s political, social, and cultural formations. He is currently working on a book manuscript, Practices of Freedom: Everyday Struggles for Autonomy, Community, and Power in Jamaica, 1780-1840, which examines how enslaved and freed people confronted day-to-day challenges and developed a repertoire of strategies and techniques to wrest greater freedom from planters, other enslavers, and the state in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Jamaica. His work has been supported by the American Historical Association, the Fulbright Program, John Carter Brown Library, Princeton University Libraries, and several centers at Duke and Brown. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Duke University.
Email: mjbecker@umd.edu
Curriculum Advisors
Dr. Holly Brewer
Burke Chair of American Cultural and Intellectual History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland – College Park
Project Director and Lead Editor
Holly Brewer is Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland a specialist in early American history and the early British empire. Her work situates the origins and impact of political ideas in laws and practical policies across England and its American empire. Her first book traced the origin and impact of “democratical” ideas across the empire by examining debates about who can consent in theory and legal practice: By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority won three national prizes including the 2008 Biennial Book Prize of the Order of the Coif from the American Association of Law Schools, the 2006 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association and the 2006 Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History. She also won three prizes for her article “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia” (1997), including the 1998 Clifford Prize for the best article on any aspect of Eighteenth Century Studies and the 2000 Douglass Adair Memorial Award, for the best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly in the past six years. She is currently finishing a book that situates the origins of American slavery in the ideas and legal practices associated with the divine rights of kings, tentatively entitled “Slavery & Sovereignty in Early America and the British Empire,’ for which she was awarded fellowships from the NEH, NHC in 2009, the Patrick Henry Fellowship from the Starr Center in 2012, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. She published “Slavery, Sovereignty and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery” in the American Historical Review (October 2017), which received both the 2019 Srinivas Aravamudan Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies for an article published in the previous year that pushes the boundaries, geographical and conceptual, of eighteenth-century studies by using a transnational, comparative, or cosmopolitan approach as well as an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Clifford Prize, American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. She published “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire” in the Law & History Review 39 (December 2021). Also see her “Slavery-Entangled Philosophy: Does Locke’s Entanglement with Slavery Undermine his Philosophy?” AEON, September 12, 2018. For more information, and links to many of her articles, see her personal website earlymodernjustice.org. For her unpublished papers, see SSRN. Professor Brewer is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and former co-editor of the American Society for Legal History’s book series as well as membership co-chair for the ASLH. In addition to the Guggenheim fellowship, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Huntington Library, among others. You can follow her on twitter @earlymodjustice.
Email: hbrewer@umd.edu
Curriculum Advisor
Chris Irwin
Curriculum Advisor
Zac Francis