Mark M. Carroll

Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Houston
area: United States South, social & legal history
office: 214 Read Hall
phone: 573-882-0463
email: carrollmm@missouri.edu
C.V. [in WordPerfect]

B.A. University of Louisiana–Lafayette, 1982
M.A. The University of Houston, 1990
Ph.D. The University of Houston, 1997

Brief biography

Professor Carroll was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in the Cajun country of southwest Louisiana. After completing one year of law school and then graduate studies in legal history at The University of Houston under the direction of Cullen Professor of History and Law Robert C. Palmer, he arrived in Columbia to begin his career in the MU Department of History in August 1998.

Major publications

Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823–1860 (University of Texas Press, 2001). In this book, Professor Carroll draws on social, cultural, and legal history to trace the development of sexual, family, and racial-caste relations in the most turbulent polity on the southern frontier during the antebellum period (1823–1860). He finds that the marriages of settlers in Texas were typically born of economic and practical necessity and that, with marriageable white women often unavailable, Anglo men frequently partnered with Native American, Tejano, and black women. While identifying a trans-cultural array of gender roles that combined with the law and frontier disorder to destabilize the marriages of homesteaders, he also reveals how evolving Texas law reinforced the substantial autonomy of Anglo women and provided them material rewards, even as it ensured that cross-racial sexual relationships and their reproductive consequences comported with slavery and a regime that dispossessed and subordinated free blacks, Native Americans, and Tejanos. For more book details, see www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/102-7369452-062509.

General areas of expertise and current research

While teaching courses about the early national and antebellum South, Professor Carroll specializes in the socio-cultural and legal history of the South-West frontier. Homesteads Ungovernable constituted his initial contribution to this line of enquiry. Through Winter/Spring 2005, he will be on leave to work on a book tentatively entitled Saving Gomorrah: Evangelism and “the Public Good” in the Trans-Mississippi South-West, 1804–1860. Building on funded research begun in 1999, this book will explore how Anglo-Americans in the polities carved out of the upper tier of the Louisiana Purchase (Missouri and Arkansas) harnessed the power of civil society and the state to counter the notorious vice and violence that emerged there on the heels of the American takeover. Through assessments of legislation, town ordinances, county circuit court records, appellate opinions, treatises, newspapers, personal papers, and church books and documents, this work will investigate the relationship of laws promoting Protestant morality to a policy rationale dedicated to securing “the public good” – a tradition of governance he argues that was rooted 18th-century moral and political philosophy, early national “civil religion,” classical republicanism, and then reinforced by democratic forces associated with Jacksonian politics. Equally important, the book will explore the contentiousness of these developments among settling southerners committed to Jeffersonian secular ideals, Native Americans, Catholic French Creoles and Irish and German immigrants. Among other things, this investigation will look at the connection of various schemes for the regulation of “public morals” to pro-slavery ideology, transforming gender prescriptions, ethnic conflict, and racial-caste ordering in town and country.

Professor Carroll is also co-editing with Missouri State Archivist Kenneth Winn an anthology entitled History of Missouri Law, part of the multi-volume series Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest, Ohio University Press, Paul Finkelman, series editor. As well, he will make a contribution to the anthology dealing with religion, “public morals,” and issues of conscience in 20th-century Missouri. The anthology will be released in January 2007.

Recent presentation

Professor Carroll was selected the 2004 Siler Fellow by the Missouri Supreme Court Historical Society. This fellowship funded summer research in the Missouri Supreme Court case files housed at the Missouri State Archives, an investigation relevant to his current book project. He presented his findings to the society in the form of a keynote address given at its annual meeting on 8 October 2004. The address was entitled Liberty, Licentiousness, and the Missouri Politics of Mean Talk: Slander and the High Bench, 1804–1860. See the address [Wordperfect file ].

Courses taught

Undergraduate classes and seminars
Survey of American History to 1865
History of the Old South
History of the New South
History of the Southern Frontier
Sex and Violence in the Old South (Capstone research and writing seminar for graduating history majors)

Graduate seminars
Readings in the History of the South (ca. 1790–1860)
Historiography (Team taught, methods and theory)
Readings in the History of 19th-Century American Society, Culture, and Law

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Mark Carroll
Professor Carroll

book jacket
Homesteads Ungovernable