Research Interests: Early America, Race, Class, and Slavery, Disease, Mapping early America. Education: PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, 1981. Select Publications:
Ship of Death: The Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World (National Geographic Books, forthcoming 2012). Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). With Simon Middleton Down and Out In Early America (University Park, Pa.: Penn State Press, 2004). Encyclopedia of American History: Colonization and Settlement, 1685-1763 (New York: Facts on File, 2003); revised edition 2009. "A Melancholy Scene of Devastation": The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (Philadelphia: Science History Publications, 1997). With J. Worth Estes. Life in Early Philadelphia: Documents from the Revolutionary and Early National Periods (University Park, Pa.: Penn State Press, 1995).