DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  American History, Before 1900

Thematic Field(s):  Legal and Criminal History; Political and Policy History; Gender and Sexuality History

Biography

Susan J. Pearson (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, 2004) is an historian of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. She is particularly interested in the cultural politics of reform, the expansion of the state and forms of governance, and the development of American liberalism. Professor Pearson is the author of two prize-winning books as well as essays and articles in The Journal of American History, History and Theory, The Journal of Social History, Modern American History, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2011) examines the connection between animal and child protection after the US Civil War, and argues that such organizations expanded state capacity by exercising police powers and through a theory of “sentimental liberalism” that reconciled rights with dependence. The Rights of the Defenseless was awarded the 2012 Merle Curti Prize for the best book in US intellectual history from the Organization of American Historians.

The Birth Certificate: An American History tells the story of both how birth registration became compulsory in the United States and how birth certificates became trusted forms of identification. She shows how states and the federal government used birth registration to collect, collate, and disseminate knowledge about their populations, and she shows how birth certificates became central to the administration of social policy and citizenship. Far from acting as neutral recorders of facts, birth certificates opened and closed the gates to school, work, entitlements, pensions, passports, drivers’ licenses, even land. They were instruments in a state that sorted and allocated goods according to age, gender, race, and citizenship status. The Birth Certificate won the 2022 Book Award from The Order of Coif, the legal honor society.

Publications

(If your library does not have access to any of the articles listed below, please contact Professor Pearson at sjp@northwestern.edu)

• The Birth Certificate: An American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
  • Co-winner of the annual 2022 Book Award granted by The Order of the Coif Executive Committee
• The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
  • Winner of the 2012 Merle Curti Prize for the best book in US Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians
• “Birth Registration and the Administration of White Supremacy,” Modern American History 5 (2022): 117-141
• “What’s Time Got to Do with It?,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 15 (Fall 2022): 434-439
• “`Facts Which Might Be Embarrassing’: Illegitimacy, Vital Registration, and State Knowledge,” in Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History, edited by Margot Canaday, Nancy Cott, and Robert Self (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
• “A New Birth of Regulation: The State of the State after the Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 5 (2015): 422-439.
• “`Age Ought to Be a Fact’: The Campaign against Child Labor and the Rise of the Birth Certificate,” Journal of American History 101 (2015): 1144-1165.
• “The Secret to Success,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 11 (Fall 2014): 97-100.
• Susan Pearson and Kimberly Smith, “Building the Animal Welfare State,” in Statebuilding From the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, edited by Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 118-139.
• “Speaking Bodies, Speaking Minds: Animals, Language, History,” 52 (December 2013): 91-108.
• Susan Pearson and Mary Weismantel, “Does The Animal Exist? Toward a Theory of Social Life with Animals,” in Beastly Natures: Animals at the Intersection of Cultural and Environmental History, edited by Dorothee Brantz (University of Virginia Press, 2010), 17-37 (Translated and reprinted: “Gibt es das Tier? Sozialtheoretische Reflexionen,” in Tierische Geschichte: Di Beziehung von Mensch und Tier in der Kultur der Moderne, edited by Dorothee Brantz and Christof Mauch (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), 379-399).
• “Animal Rights Activism,” in Speaking Out With Many Voices: A Documentary History, edited by Heather Thompson (Prentice Hall, 2010), 51-61.
• “Infantile Specimens: Showing Babies in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Social History 42 (December 2008): 341-370.
• “The Cow and the Plow: Animal Suffering, Human Guilt and the Crime of Cruelty,” Studies in Law, Politics and Society; special issue, Toward A Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities 36 (2005): 77-10. 

Recent Awards and Honors

• 2022 Book Award, The Order of the Coif (awarded for The Birth Certificate)
• Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2014-2015
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2012-2013
• Kluge Fellow, Library of Congress, 2012-2013 (declined)
• Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians, 2012 (awarded for The Rights of the Defenseless)
• Andrew W. Mellon Short-term Research Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2010
• Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008-2009 (declined)
• Best Article Prize, Society for the History of Children and Youth, 2007-2008 (awarded for “Infantile Specimens”)

Media Appearances

• “The Humble Birth Certificate is a Powerful Document,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation Sunday Extra, August 6, 2022
• “Oklahoma’s Ban on Nonbinary Birth Certificates Isn’t Just Cruel. It’s Ahistorical,” The Atlantic, May 6, 2022
• “Birth” on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Civics 101 Podcast
• “Birth Certificates Have Always Been a Weapon for White Supremacists,” Washington Post, Made by History, September 11, 2018
• “Young Americans,” Backstory, January 24, 2014
• “The Beasts Within,” Backstory, May 26, 2015
• “A History of Manufacturing in Five Objects,” Backstory, October 13, 2016