Waldrep, Christopher 1951–

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Waldrep, Christopher 1951–

(Christopher Reef Waldrep)

PERSONAL:

Born November 19, 1951, in Oak Ridge, TN; son of Reef Vuin (an educator) and Ella Christine (a homemaker) Waldrep; married Pamela Jean Heiney (a librarian); children: Janelle Christine, Andrea Jean. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Eastern Illinois University, B.S., 1973; Purdue University, M.A., 1974; Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1990. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Methodist.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Martinez, CA. Office—Department of History, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Art teacher at public schools in Washington Court House, OH, 1974-90; Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, assistant professor, 1990-94, associate professor, 1994-99, professor of history, 1999-2000; San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of Constitutional History, 2000—.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, American Society for Legal History, Southern Historical Association, Kentucky Historical Society, Mississippi Historical Society.

AWARDS, HONORS:

McLemore Prize, best book in Mississippi history or biography, Mississippi Historical Society, 1998, for Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-80.

WRITINGS:

Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1993.

Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-80, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1998.

(Editor, with Donald Nieman) Local Matters: Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2001.

Racial Violence on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents, American Bibliographical Center-Clio Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 2001.

The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2002.

(With Lynne Curry) The Constitution and the Nation, Volume 1: Establishing the Constitution, 1215-1829, Volume 2: The Civil War and American Constitutionalism, 1830-1890, Volume 3: The Regulatory State, 1890-1945, Volume 4: A Revolution in Rights, 1937-2002, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 2003.

Racial Violence on Trial: A Sourcebook with Cases, Laws, and Documents, Hackett Publishing (Indianapolis, IN), 2005.

Vicksburg's Long Shadow: The Civil War Legacy of Race and Remembrance, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2005.

(Editor, with Michael Bellesiles) Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

(Editor) Lynching in America: A History in Documents, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to history journals, including Journal of Southern History, Perspectives, and American Historical Review. Senior editor of Internet journal H-Law.

SIDELIGHTS:

Christopher Waldrep once told CA: "I was born in Tennessee and lived in Mississippi for a time. Although I lived in the north for many years, I have retained an interest in the south. Between 1974 and 1990 I taught art to high school and middle school students in Washington Court House, Ohio. I started traveling to Kentucky on weekends to conduct small research projects. As time passed, I went to Kentucky more and more and began publishing historical articles in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. I still taught art, but I came to think of myself as more historian than artist.

"As I traveled in Kentucky, collecting information for articles, people urged me to write about the Night Riders, a vigilante movement active early in the twentieth century. These night-riding tobacco farmers used violence to resist encroaching industrialization. At first, I thought them too recent to be interesting; I wanted to go back into history as far as I could. While visiting the Filson Club Historical Society, however, I discovered the Willson Papers, an extensive collection of correspondence by the governor of Kentucky during the Night Rider crisis. Willson's day-to-day communications with state militia officers, local judges, and detectives formed a narrative more exciting than any novel I'd ever read. I decided to write a book.

"I was a professor of history at Eastern Illinois University, the same place where I earned my undergraduate degree many years ago. Now I am the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of Constitutional History at San Francisco State University. I teach constitutional and social history, and I am researching racial violence in the United States.

"I tell my students that historians can be categorized according to what they identify as the engine that makes things happen. I belong to that school of scholarship that identifies law as an important force in history. The heart of the problem with the Night Riders, I found, was that local courts stepped aside, allowing vigilantism free reign. In Mississippi, my research revealed that whites sought to deny blacks access to the courts."