“12 Years Between Life and Death,” American Literary History, 26:2 (2014): 317-325.

“Introduction,” Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Library of America, 2014): ix-xxi.

“Fear and Doubt in Cleveland,” The New York Times Disunion: 106 Articles From The New York Times Opinionator, ed. Ted Widmer (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2013): 22-26.

“Foreword,” Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, by Sterling Stuckey, 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): ix-xiii.

“Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, From the First to the Second Inaugural,” The Lincoln Herald, 114:2 (2012): 95-103.

“The ‘Terrible Reality’ of the First Living-Room Wars,” WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels (Houston and New Haven: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Yale University Press, 2012): 80-93.

“Foreword,” Civil War America: A Social and Cultural History, eds. Maggi M. Morehouse and Zoe Trodd (New York: Routledge, 2012): v-xxv.

“Foreword,” In the Words of Frederick Douglass: Representative Quotations from the Speeches, Letters, and Writings of the Most Influential 19th-Century African American, eds. John R. McKivigan and Heather L. Kaufman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012): xi-xvi.

“Lincoln’s ‘Step-Children’ and the National Family,” The Living Lincoln, eds. Thomas A. Horrocks, Harold Holzer, Frank J. Williams (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011): 79-97.

“Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures,” Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011): 66-94.

“Afterword,” Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason, David Hirsch and Dan Van Haften (New York: Savas Beatie, 2010): 250-252.

“Abolition and Antislavery,” The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, eds. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010): 556-577.

“The Lincoln-Douglass Debate,” Reviews in American History, 38:1 (2010): 169-180.

 “Reflections on Lincoln and English Studies,” College English, 72:2 (2009): 166-168.

“Literary Neo-Confederates and Civil Rights,” Modern Language Studies, 39:1 (2009): 42-55.

“Missouri Compromise,” The New American Literary History of America, eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009): 150-154.

“Douglass’s Self-Making and the Culture of Abolitionism,” Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, ed. Maurice S. Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 13-30.

“Interspatialism in the Nineteenth-Century South: The Natchez of Henry Norman,” Slavery and Abolition 29:2 (2008): 247-264. Republished in Public Art, Memorials, and Atlantic Slavery, eds. Celeste-Marie Bernier and Judie Newman (New York: Routledge, 2009): 110-126.

“Forms of Redemption in the African American Experience,” Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America, ed. Roger Lundin (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008): 121-132.

"Interracial Friendship and the Aesthetics of Freedom," Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, eds. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 134-158.

“Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man,” The Cambridge Companion to The African-American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 201-217.

"Foreword," From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives, eds. B. Eugene McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007): xi-xviii.

"Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Slave Redemptions," Buying Freedom: The Ethics and Economics of Slave Redemption, eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007): 213-222.

“Imagining Equality” and “The Problem of Evil in Post-Emancipation America,” The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Race, and the Ambiguities of Reform (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007): 221-230, 315-336.

“Melville, Slavery and the American Dilemma,” A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006): 214-230.

“Foreword,” American Protest Literature, ed. Zoe Trodd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006): xi-xviii.

“Introduction,” The Pathfinder, by James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Signet Classics, 2006): v-xvi.

“Introduction” and “Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures,” Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York: New Press, 2006): xiii-xxxiii, 256-267.

“Embattled Manhood and New England Writers, 1860-1870,” Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War, eds. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): 120-139.

“The Civil War” and “Photography,” American History Through Literature, 1820-1870, eds. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert D. Sattelmeyer (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006): 232-245, 872-876.

“The Art of Protest,” in Danica Phelps, Everyday Life (Grinnell: Faulconer Gallery, 2005): 15-17.

“Meteor of War: The John Brown Cycle” (with Zoe Trodd), The Afterlife of John Brown, eds. Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 121-144.

“Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” Raritan 25:1 (2005): 114-136. Republished in Ideology and Aesthetics in American Literature and Arts, ed. Jaroslav Kusnír (Hanover: Ibidem Verlag, 2006): 21-50.

“Philip Trager’s Dancers,” 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, Vol. 6 (2004): 40-49.

“The Problem of Freedom in The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins (New York: Basic Books, 2004): 53-70.

“Foreword,” Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: The Modern Library, 2003): v-xxviii.

“Interracial Friendships in The Deerslayer,” James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art: Papers from the 2003 Cooper Seminar (No. 14): 83-87.

“The Nature of Progress,” Civil War Book Review, feature article, Spring 2002.

"Popular Culture," Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001).

"Introduction," Robert Stivers: Listening to Cement (Santa Fe: Arena Editions, 2000).

"Advent Among the Indians: The Revolutionary Ethos of Gerrit Smith, James McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown," in John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, eds., Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999): 236-273.

"George Barrell Cheever," "Thomas Hovenden," "Richard Realf," and "James McCune Smith," American National Biography, eds. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Vol. 4, 768-770; Vol. 11, 286-288; Vol. 18, 234-236; Vol. 20, 216-217.

"Vik Muniz' Visual Reality," and "Tom Baril's Buildings," 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, Vol. 2 (1999): 43-44, 100-102.

"Race and Contemporary Photography: Willie Robert Middlebrook and the Legacy of Frederick Douglass," 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, Vol. 1 (1998): 55-59.

"Daguerreotyping the National Soul: The Portraits of Southworth and Hawes, 1843-1860," Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Vol. 22 (1997): 69-107. Republished in Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes, eds. Grant B. Romer and Brian Wallis (New York and Rochester: International Center of Photography and George Eastman House, 2005): 57-74.

"Beyond Social Control: The Example of Gerrit Smith, Romantic Radical," American Transcendental Quarterly 11.3 (1997): 233-259.

"Gerrit Smith," "Richard Realf," "Immediatism," and "Slavery Depicted in Modern Art," The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997): 51-53, 364, 542-543, 597-598.

Conceptualism—Postconceptualism, The 1960s to the 1990s, with Lynn Warren (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992).

Untitled (photograph) in Jay Seeley, High Contrast (Boston: Focal Press, 1992): 61.