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I am a historian of the United States. My research focuses on the tangled histories of slavery, democracy, and citizenship in the early national period and, more recently, settler colonialism, cartography, and the love of nature in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My first book is Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Penn, 2016). I have also written essays about gender and politics in early Washington, D.C.; early naturalization law and the formation of national citizenship; and the regulation of slavery and race in post-revolutionary Virginia. I am currently working on a book about how and why place names become attached to the land, and what it means to encounter the natural world through a claimed, named, and surveyed landscape. Among other questions, I am trying to figure out why so many natural features in the western United States are named after the Devil and what happens when you travel to those places—from Devils Tower to Mount Diablo and beyond—in the archive, by map, and on foot.