Amanda Laury Kleintop

Dr. Kleintop is a historian of the US Civil War and Reconstruction, and slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World. Her manuscript project, Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War (forthcoming, Fall 2025, The University of North Carolina Press), tells a novel story of the Civil War and emancipation by examining post-war debates about property rights in people. Even in defeat, white southerners fought to retain the financial value of enslaved people by demanding federal compensation for emancipation. Other Americans, both white and Black, demanded that former enslaver bear the financial burden of emancipation to dissolve an immoral institution that had started a bloody civil war. In section four of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress guaranteed that no slaveowner or slave state would receive reimbursements for freed people. After losing this battle, too, white southerners obscured the history of their claims and convinced most white Americans that they had never asked for such compensation. To do so would have suggested that they had fought the Civil War to protect their ability from profit from slavery, a suggestion they had come to vigorously deny. Instead, they downplayed their compensation claims and crafted a new historical narrative that absolved themselves of four years of bloodshed and generations of enslavement.

Research from Counting the Cost of Freedom has been published in Slavery & Abolition and is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Historical Association, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, the American Bar Foundation (Chicago, IL), and the American Society for Legal History, among others.

Dr. Kleintop is also an experienced Public and Digital historian who helps students connect the histories of slavery and emancipation in the US to their campuses and communities. She has coordinated and collaborated on a variety of public-facing, often digital projects at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (2018-2022), Northwestern University (2016-2018), the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab, and the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission in Richmond, Virginia (2008-2012).

In 2024-2026, Dr. Kleintop is the Center for the Study of Religion, Society & Culture Scholar. In that role, they'll develop student learning opportunities about the role of religious communities in U.S. history and in Elon’s history