For The Root: "Yes, There Were Black Confederates. Here’s Why" (2015)

For Civil War Times: "The Song That Marches On: The Obscure Origins and History of America’s Unofficial Anthem" (2015)

For the Washington Post: "The Inaugural Audience" (2014)

For the Wall Street Journal: "The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation" (2014)

For the Wall Street Journal: "Another America" (2013)

For the Washington Post: "Hooker’s Defeat" (2013)

For The Christian Century: "How the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' Became America’s Hymn" (2013)

For Huffington Post: "What Every American Should Know About Frederick Douglass, Abolitionist Prophet" (2013)

For the New York Review of Books: "Were Hawthorne’s Politics 'Disgraceful'?" (2013)

For Civility and American Democracy: A National Forum, "Civility, Civil Society, and Civil Wars" (2012)

For Religion & Politics: "The Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address" (2012)

For the Wall Street Journal: "Outlaws Together" (2012)

For the New York Times: "John Brown Marches On" (2011)

For the Wall Street Journal: "Briefly Out of Bondage" (2011)

For the New York Times: "Fear and Doubt in Cleveland" (2010)
 
For the Wall Street Journal: "The Great Northern Migration" (2010)

For the Wall Street Journal: "In a Fury Over Freedom" (2010)

For the New York Times: "A Pragmatic Precedent" (2009)

For Huffington Post: "What Obama Can Learn from Lincoln's Inaugural" (2009)

For The International Literary Quarterly: "The Politics of Self-Making and the 2008 Presidential Campaign" (2009)

For America's Civil War: "Rebelling Against the Rebellion" (2009)

For the 11th Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference: “I’ll Be John Browned" (2009)

For the Lincoln Bicentennial Memorial Committee of Newburgh: "Lincoln’s Legacy on Race, Freedom, and Equality" (2009)

For Rorotoko: "The Parallel Lives of Douglass and Lincoln" (2008)

For Slavery & Abolition: "Interspatialism in the Nineteenth-century South" (2008)

For the New York Times: "Letter to the Editor: Join The Club" (2008)

For the New York Sun: "Slavery and the Legacies of the American Revolution" (2006)

For Time Magazine: "Across the Great Divide" (2005)

For Raritan: "Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom" (2005)

For the National Association for Olmsted Parks: "Looking Southward" (2005)

For Civil War Book Review: "Whitman Embodied America" (2005)

For Civil War Book Review: "Photographs and Parallel Poetry" (2005)

For the 14th James Fenimore Cooper Seminar at SUNY, College at Oneonta: "Interracial Friendships in The Deerslayer" (2003)

For the 5th Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference: "In the Shadow of a Dream: White Abolitionists and Race" (2003)

For the 3rd Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale: "American Responses to British Emancipation" (2001)

For ATQ: "Beyond Social Control: The Example of Gerrit Smith, Romantic Radical" (1997)