Dr. Robert Bland, Assistant Professor of American History is a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. Dr. Bland has been at the University of Tennessee since 2019, and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on African American history, the US South, and the craft of social and cultural history. His upcoming book project explores the efforts of black South Carolinians and their northern allies to preserve the last bastion of radical Republicanism in the South during the half century that followed Compromise of 1877.