My next research project, tentatively “A Question of Freedom” in Post-Revolutionary America, looks at case files of African Americans in the District of Columbia courts and Prince George’s County, Maryland, for the period 1720 to 1820, and chronicles the story of Mima Queen’s historic petition for freedom from slavery which came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1813.
Recent books, chapters, and peer-reviewed publications include:
 Railroads and regional labor markets in the mid-nineteenth-century United States: a case study of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,” Richard Healey, William G. Thomas, and Katie Lahman, in Journal of Historical Geography Vol. 41, July 2013, pp. 13-32) |
 The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (Yale University Press, 2011) |
“‘Swerve Me?’: The South, Railroads, and the Rush to Modernity” in The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress ed. by Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers (Oxford University Press, April 2011) |
 “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” in The Journal of American History, September 2008. |
 “Black and On the Border,” co-author with Edward L. Ayers and Anne S. Rubin, in Slavery, Resistance, Freedom ed. Gabor Boritt and Scott Hancock, Oxford University Press, 2007. |
 “Nothing Ought to Astonish Us: Confederate Civilians in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign” in The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, ed. Gary Gallagher, University of North Carolina Press, 2006. |
 “Computing and the Historical Imagination,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. |
 “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” co-author with Edward L. Ayers, in The American Historical Review. |
 Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law and Power in the New South, Louisiana State University Press, 1999. |
 The Civil War on the Web: A Guide to the Very Best Sites, co-author with Alice Carter and Richard Jensen, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. |
Essays, Op-Ed articles, Digital works, and Other Writings:
