Interview with Diane Mutti Burke about her book, On Slavery’s Border

ON SLAVERY'S BORDER is a bottom-up examination of how slavery and slaveholding were influenced by both the geography and the scale of the slaveholding enterprise. Diane Mutti Burke focuses on the Missouri counties located along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to investigate small-scale slavery at the level of the household and neighborhood.

The Early American Places (EAP) series focuses on historical developments in specific places of North America. Though these developments often involved far-flung parts of the world, they were experienced in particular communities—the local places where people lived, worked, and made sense of their changing worlds. By restricting its focus to smaller geographic scales, but stressing that towns, colonies, and regions were part of much larger networks, EAP will combine up-to-date scholarly sophistication with an emphasis on local particularities and trajectories. 

This interview with Diane Mutti Burke is the first in a series of videos with EAP authors. In each video, the authors are asked three questions:
1) Why did you focus your research on this particular place/area/region?
2) Please tell us a little more about your book.
3) Is your study specific to your area or is it applicable to other places/area/regions?