Staff Profiles

Modules taught

Undergraduate

HIST4009: Making History: Teaches the key concepts and basic skills which are vital for historians and define the discipline of history as currently practiced.

HIST4008: Superpowers: An International History of the Cold War: Modern international history that explores the rise and fall of the United States and Soviet Union within the context of an era-defining  global confrontation.

HIST5017: Historical Writing: Allows students to evaluate and write any kind of academic text, providing concrete help with dissertation-writing and enabling students to create their own project with expert support.

HIST 5014: American Giant: Examines America’s emergence as a leading international power within the context of the unique political and social order of the twentieth century.

HIST 6010: Land of the Free: Slavery and Servitude in American History: Explores how slavery in the United States began, what it meant to be among the enslaved, and whether their descendants have ever achieved true freedom.

Postgraduate

HIST 7002: Theories, Methods, and Practices in History: Introduces students to key methods and theories essential to the study of history at postgraduate level, as well as the advanced study skills needed for independent research.

Armies, Immigrants, and Gangs: The History of the U.S.-Mexican Border: Explores the fraught history of the U.S.-Mexican border and the central role that the boundary with Mexico has played in shaping the American national identity.

Journal articles

• Beverton A, 'Transborder Capitalism and National Reconciliation: The American Press Reimagines U.S.-Mexican Relations after the Civil War '
  Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 21 (1) (2021) pp.40-61
  ISSN: 1537-7814 eISSN: 1943-3557
  Abstract

  The end of the Civil War did not eradicate Americans’ concerns regarding the fragility of their republic. For many years after Appomattox, newspapers from across the political spectrum warned that the persistence of sectionalism in the postwar United States threatened to condemn the country to the kind of interminable internal disorder supposedly endemic among the republics of Latin America. This article examines how, from the early 1870s onward, growing numbers of U.S. editors, journalists, and political leaders called on Americans to concentrate on extending their nation’s commercial reach into Mexico. In doing so, they hoped to topple divisive domestic issues—notably Reconstruction—from the top of the national political agenda. These leaders in U.S. public discourse also anticipated that collaboration in a project to extend the United States’ continental power would revive affective bonds of nationality between the people of the North and South. In making this analysis, this article argues that much of the early impetus behind U.S. commercial penetration south of the Rio Grande after the Civil War was fueled by Americans’ deep anxieties regarding the integrity of their so-called exceptional republic.
  

  Website 
• Beverton AD, '“We knew no North, no South”: U.S.–Mexican War Veterans and the Construction of Public Memory in the Post-Civil War United States, 1874–1897'
  American Nineteenth Century History 17 (1) (2016) pp.1-22
  ISSN: 1466-4658
  Abstract

  In 1874, American veterans of the U.S.–Mexican War 1846–1848 formed the National Association of Veterans of the Mexican War (NAVMW). Until the organization’s demise in 1897, NAVMW members crafted and celebrated a vision of their war with Mexico as a national triumph which had united Americans from all sections of the Union in a common cause. This article examines how, by promoting this particular memory of the war to the American public, NAVMW members sought to remind their countrymen of their shared national history, and so aid the process of reconciliation between North and South in the post-Civil War era.
  

  Website 

"'We knew No North, No South': U.S.-Mexican War Veterans and the Construction of Public Memory in the Post Civil War United States, 1874-1897," American Nineteenth Century History 17, no. 1 (2016), 1-22. 

"Transborder Capitalism and National Reconciliation: The American Press Reimagines U.S.-Mexico Relations After the Civil War," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2021), 1-22. 

I am currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled  Exceptionalism in Crisis: Faction, Anarchy, and Mexico in the American Imagination during the Civil War Era