Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the Past President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellowship in 2022. She taught at the University of Massachusetts for over twenty years where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico and cited in The New York Times 1619 Project. Her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, which won the Frederick Douglass, the Organization of American Historians’ Avery Craven, the Southern Historical Association’s biannual James Rawley, and SHEAR Best Book prizes, was also long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. It was widely reviewed and named editor’s choice in The New York Times Book Review and the book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication. The Chinese edition of the book, translated by Professor Li Dan of Nanjing University, was published by the Beijing Han Tang Zhi Dao Book Distribution Co., Ltd. in 2025. She is the author and editor of several other books and articles. Her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 was published by Liveright (Norton) and reviewed by The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Republic among other outlets. It won the biennial President’s Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era in 2026. It was cited by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her concurrence in Trump v Barbara. She was interviewed in the Reconstruction podcast produced by President Barack Obama’s and Malcolm Gladwell’s media companies and curated the 250th exhibition, “The Second American Revolution” at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois based on her book. A historian of the long nineteenth century, her research interests lie in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Professor Sinha has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin, and The Huffington Post and has been interviewed by the national and international press.
Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the Past President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellowship in 2022. She taught at the University of Massachusetts for over twenty years where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico and cited in The New York Times 1619 Project. Her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, which won the Frederick Douglass, the Organization of American Historians’ Avery Craven, the Southern Historical Association’s biannual James Rawley, and SHEAR Best Book prizes, was also long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. It was widely reviewed and named editor’s choice in The New York Times Book Review and the book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication. The Chinese edition of the book, translated by Professor Li Dan of Nanjing University, was published by the Beijing Han Tang Zhi Dao Book Distribution Co., Ltd. in 2025. She is the author and editor of several other books and articles. Her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 was published by Liveright (Norton) and reviewed by The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Republic among other outlets. It won the biennial President’s Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era in 2026. It was cited by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her concurrence in Trump v Barbara. She was interviewed in the Reconstruction podcast produced by President Barack Obama’s and Malcolm Gladwell’s media companies and curated the 250th exhibition, “The Second American Revolution” at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois based on her book. A historian of the long nineteenth century, her research interests lie in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Professor Sinha has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin, and The Huffington Post and has been interviewed by the national and international press.
Manisha Sinha, Historian 