His current research focuses on the Civil War era, specifically Union bond sales during the conflict — a story, equal parts domestic and international, which emphasizes the rise of New York City as a global power of finance. The project has been supported with fellowships at the New York Public Library and the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and will produce a digital mapping component as well, tentatively titled "Civil War Wall Street." He has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Bloomberg on a variety of related topics, and is currently researching a second book, on state default debts in the 1840s, also centered largely around New York City.