Born in Indiana and raised in San Francisco, Seth Rockman received a BA from Columbia University and completed his PhD at UC-Davis. After several years on the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles, Rockman joined the Brown History Department in 2004. His 2009 book Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore won the OAH’s Merle Curti Prize, the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, and the HL Mitchell Prize from the Southern Historical Association. Rockman is currently writing a new book about shoes, shovels, hats, and hoes manufactured in the North for use on Southern slave plantations. Additionally, he and Sven Beckert are co-editing Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development for University of Pennsylvania Press.