About the Presenter
Bartholomew Sparrow is Professor of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. His research in American Political Development examines how American politics and government have been shaped by extranational factors (and vice versa). He is the author of The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire, From the Outside In: World War II and the American State, and two other books.
At Mount Vernon he will be working on how the presence of unfree Europeans—the indentured servants, transported convicts, political exiles, and abductees who constituted a majority of immigrants to the thirteen American colonies—and their propertyless descendants systematically influenced the lives and political views of the Founding Fathers and framers (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others), shaped the texts of the Declaration, Articles of Confederation and U.S. Constitution, and led to the racialization of agricultural labor in the Southern and Chesapeake colonies over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.