Amanda Laury Kleintop

Dr. Kleintop (she/they) is a historian of the US Civil War and Reconstruction, and slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World. Their first book, Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War (The University of North Carolina Press, 2025), tells the complex history of US debates about compensating enslavers. It reveals that white southerners did not accept immediate, uncompensated emancipation with Confederate defeat. Their persistence eventually led to the creation of Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which abolished the right to profit from property in people. Surprisingly, former Confederates responded by using Lost Cause history-making to obscure the fact that they had demanded financial redress in the first place. The largely successful efforts of white Southerners to erase this history continues to generate false understandings today. This legal battle also undermined efforts by formerly enslaved people to receive reparations for themselves and their descendants—a debate that persists in today’s national dialogue.

Counting the Cost of Freedom was a finalist for the 2025 CPH Book Prize, Southern Methodist University Center for Presidential History, and was 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. As a member of the Committee for Elon History & Memory and Coordinator of the Museum Studies & Public History minor, she continues to collaborate on a variety of public-facing, often digital projects. 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. As a 2025-2027 Center for Engaged Learning Scholar alongside Dr. Cora Wigger (Economics), she works to enhance data lieracy pedagogy with interdisciplinary approaches in History and Economics.