Konstantin Dierks

Konstantin Dierks is Associate Professor of History. His first book, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (2009), focused on the cultural, social, economic, and political history of letter writing and communications in the early anglophone Atlantic World. Letter writing steeped the white middle class in imperatives of self-improvement and vulnerabilities of personal agency, while assuring them of their social innocence, their technical credentials, and their moral deserving. The force of this social myopia is as critical as racism, the book argues, in explaining the glaring dearth of moral conscience underwriting the legalization of massive violence toward Native Americans and African-Americans so endemic to the eighteenth century. His current project is tentatively titled Globalization of the United States, 1815-1861, and traces the shift in American understandings of and relationships to the wider world between the American Revolution and the American Civil War.