Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan is the author of Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic, published by New York University Press in 2019. Vagrants and Vagabonds focuses on the control over poor migrants’ mobility and how their movement shaped ideas of class, race, and status in the United States. Examining how local and state government’s criminalized vagrancy, O’Brassill-Kulfan illustrates that the vagrant, whether real of a figment of people’s imaginations, were crucial to the development of the state and ideas about community.
Dr. O’Brassill-Kulfan is an instructor of public history at Rutgers University. She specializes in early American social and legal history, as well as public history.
Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.
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New Books in African American Studies