Scott Gac’s current book project recovers a Black civic and intellectual renaissance in Hartford and across New England during the era of gradual emancipation. Centering Jacob Oson, Hosea Easton, James Pennington, Edward A. Jones, Ann Plato, Rebecca Primus, and Augustus Washington, it traces how Black Hartford residents built and sustained institutions through which they challenged disenfranchisement, resisted colonization campaigns, and expanded the possibilities for Black education, expression, and political belonging.

Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America

This book traces how violence shaped the United States from the Revolution through the Gilded Age. Moving across government action, warfare, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and civilian life, it shows how force became embedded in American nationhood.

American Violence: Histories, Structures, and Legacies

Co-edited with Caroline E. Light, this collection brings together scholars across history, law, cultural studies, Indigenous studies, Black studies, gender studies, and violence studies. Its essays rethink violence as central rather than exceptional to U.S. history, examining its role in state formation, racial hierarchy, legal belonging, public memory, and global power.

Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform

This book reconstructs the world of the Hutchinson Family Singers, whose music carried antislavery, temperance, women’s rights, and other reform causes into nineteenth-century public life. It examines how performance, politics, religion, and celebrity converged in American reform culture.