Daniel Thorp, associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, discusses the impact of slavery on the drafting, ratification, and interpretation of the United States’ Constitution from the founding of the nation through the coming of the Civil War.
Daniel Thorp earned both a masters and doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University before beginning to teach history at Virginia Tech, where he is currently an associate professor of history and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Academic Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. He has also taught at East Carolina University and at Sunderland University, in England, and spent six months as a Fulbright Scholar in Wellington, New Zealand. Though trained as a colonial historian, he also teaches the history of the American West and introductory surveys of the history of the United States. He is the author of two dozen articles on a range of topics in eighteenth and nineteenth-century American history and three books: The Moravian Community in Colonial North Carolina, Lewis & Clark: An American Journey, and Facing Freedom: An African American Community in Virginia, from Reconstruction to Jim Crow.
