Book cover, Branding Trust

Branding Trust: Advertising & Trademarks in Nineteenth Century America

Now available through the University of Pennsylvania Press, and wherever books are sold. Buy directly from Penn Press and get a 30% discount! Enter code “PENN-JMBLACK30” at checkout.


Upcoming Events

    • February 29, 2024 at 6pm: Book Talk, Hagley Library (Wilmington, DE)
    • March 19, 2024 at 6pm: West Pittston Library (Pittston, PA) 
    • April 4, 2024 at 5:30pm: Opening Reception, “The Mark: Graphic Design and Consumer Culture Since 1800,” Pauly Friedman Art Gallery, Misericordia University 
    • April 25, 2024 (time TBD): Book signing and Gallery talk, Misericordia University 
    • May 15, 2024 at 6pm: “Philadelphia and the Origins of Modern Advertising,” Philadelphia Athenaeum 
    • May 16, 2024 (time TBD): Book talk, Winterthur Museum & Library
    • May 31, 2024 at 11am: Live-Streamed Panel Discussion, Business History Conference 

Recent Press / Interviews 

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Current Research

My scholarship examines the intersection of images, the law, and society in the United States, with a particular focus on fraud and the history of capitalism.  My  book, Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America, (University of Pennsylvania Press, Dec. 2023), examines the problem of counterfeit goods that ransacked the American market in the nineteenth century, the strategies used by advertising experts to combat the problem, and the effects of these on American consumers.  Tracing the development of American trademark law, it reveals early strategies to build goodwill in the visual and textual appeals used by advertisers before 1920.

I’m also working on several new projects, which collectively interrogate the interplay between visual culture and concepts of belonging / exclusion, on the one hand, and between visual media, commerce, and authenticity on the other.  I’m currently researching my next book project, which will further explore the history of counterfeit consumer goods order to uncover the cultural and economic that propelled the production and purchase of fakes.  I’m particularly interested in art forgery and related frauds, especially considering the ways in which museums stimulated a market for fake collectibles in the nineteenth century. Aside from this line of research, I’m also working on several articles related to African American print culture in the nineteenth-century, advertising practices and infrastructure in the antebellum years, and the role of visual media in configuring popular and legal constructions of citizenship. 

Each of these projects depend heavily upon examinations of visual and material culture to understand the ways in which culture, commerce, and the law intertwine.

Books, Articles, and Public Writing 

Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

“Noticing Material Culture,” Management & Organizational History 18, no. 1-2 (2023): 31-42.

“Teaching Public History Online” (with Abigail Gautreau, Will Stoutamire, and Katie Stringer Clary), History@Work: An Online publication of the National Council on Public History (2 October 2020).

“Autograph Albums and the Commercialization of Memory in the United States,” in Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration, ed. Katherine Haldane Grenier and Amanda R. Mushal (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), 39-60.

Anthracite Photographers: Photographers of Anthracite Exhibit Catalog (with Bode Morin, John Fielding, and Sarah Sporko), (Scranton, PA: Anthracite Heritage Museum, 2018).

Gender in the Academy: Recovering the Hidden History of Women’s Scholarship on Scrapbooks and Albums,” Material Culture 50, no. 2 (2018): 38-52.

Exchange Cards: Advertising, Album-making, and the Commodification of Sentiment in the Gilded Age,” Winterthur Portfolio 51, no. 1 (2017): 1-53.

Teaching Uncomfortable Narratives in Public History Courses,” History@Work: An Online publication of the National Council on Public History (27 September 2017).

Historical Memory and Contemporary Politics,” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History (9 Aug 2017).

“Citizenship and Caricature: Teaching the American Past with Images,” in Art & Public History: Approaches, Opportunities, and Challenges, ed. Rebecca Bush & K. Tawny Paul (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

Investing in Public History Students,” History@Work (8 Sept 2015).

Machines that Made History: Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering (New York: ASME Press, 2014).

“‘The Mark of Honor’: Trademark Law, Goodwill, and the Early Branding Strategies of National Biscuit,” in We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life…and Always Has, ed. Danielle Sarver Coombs and Bob Batchelor (Denver: Praeger / ABC-CLIO, 2014), 262-284.

“Corporate Calling Cards: Advertising Trade Cards and Logos in the US, 1876-1890.”  Journal of American Culture 32, no. 4 (2009): 291-306.

Public History Projects & Lectures

“Hope and Pain,” Visible Resistance: Art and Action in the Long Civil Rights Movement, lecture, Black History Month Event Series, Misericordia University, February 2022.

“Visual Culture and Public Memory,” The Annual Knox Mine Disaster Commemoration, lecture, Anthracite Heritage Museum (Scranton, PA), January 2022.

Dr. Black Responds to Viewers’ Questions,” COVID-19 and the Humanities (lecture series), Medical and Health Humanities Program, Misericordia University, Dallas, PA; July 2020. This lecture has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities CARES grant, “Humanities in the Time of COVID-19: Fostering Community Dialogue,” Award Number: AH-274885-20.

Freedom in the Time of COVID-19,” COVID-19 and the Humanities (lecture series), Medical and Health Humanities Program, Misericordia University, Dallas, PA; July 2020. This lecture has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities CARES grant, “Humanities in the Time of COVID-19: Fostering Community Dialogue,” Award Number: AH-274885-20.

Co-Curator (with Bode Morin and John Fielding), Anthracite Photographers: Photographers of Anthracite (opened December 1, 2018), Semi-permanent Exhibit, Anthracite Heritage Museum (Scranton, PA).

Editor (with Allan Austin), Ambassadors of Goodwill: The American Friends Service Committee Abroad (May 2017), Online Exhibit, Misericordia University in Partnership with the American Friends Service Committee (Philadelphia).

Editor, Main Street Pittston and Mapping Historic Pittston (August 2016). Online Exhibits, Misericordia University in Partnership with the Greater Pittston Historical Society,

Editor, Mining the Past: Family, Faith & Industry in Postwar Pittston (August 2015). Online Exhibit, Misericordia University in Partnership with the Greater Pittston Historical Society.

Recent Book Reviews

Rachel N. Klein, Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth-Century New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), in Journal of American History 108, no. 3 (2021): 589-590.

Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), in Journal of the Civil War Era 11, no. 3 (2021): 410-414.

Jennifer C. Lena, Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), in Journal of American History 107, no. 3 (2020): 723–724.

Laura M. Holzman. Contested Image: Defining Philadelphia for the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019), in H-Pennsylvania, November 2020.

Lawrence A. Kreiser, Marketing the Blue and Gray: Newspaper Advertising and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2019), Journal of Southern History 86, no. 2 (2020): 483-484.

Amy DeFalco Lippert, Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), in H-California, July 2018.

Peter Knight, Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), in H-SHGAPE, November 2016.

Selected Presentations

“Reinventing Interpretation: Material Culture” (with Marina Moskowitz), Methods and Madness: Business Historical Methods in a New Age of Extremes, Business History Conference Mid-Year Meeting (virtual); September 2022

“Internships at the ‘Virtual’ Crossroads: Lessons from the Pandemic,” National Council on Public History Conference (virtual); May 2022 (panelist)

“Whiteness as a Business Strategy: A Comparative Look at Newspaper Advertising in the Age of Jackson,” Business History Conference Annual Meeting (hybrid), Mexico City, Mexico; April 2022

“‘Letter Salesmanship’:  Direct-Mail Technologies and Techniques in the Early Twentieth Century,” Reach Out and Touch Someone: A Conference on Commercial Intimacy and Personalization, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE; November 2021

“Collaboration in the Time of COVID-19: Digital Collectives to Support Teaching, Outreach, and Research,” National Council on Public History Conference (held virtually); March 2021

“Visualizing Character: American Advertising Personalities in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Business History Conference Annual Meeting (held virtually); March 2021

“‘The Genius of Pictorial Advertising’: Images and Consumer-Centered Advertising in the US, 1830-1900,” Commercial Pictures and the Arts and Technics of Visual Persuasion, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE; November 2019

“Policing Fakes: Early Trademark Regulation in the US,” Spring Research Seminar of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE; April 2019

“Using Digital Tools to Bring Hemingway to Twenty-First Century Audiences,” Eighteenth International Hemingway Conference, Hemingway Society / Ernest Hemingway Foundation, Paris, France; July 2018

“‘Shrewd Men of Small Capital’: Leveraging Cultural Capital in the Antebellum Advertising Trade,” Business History Conference Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD; April 2018

“‘Beware of Counterfeits!’ Using Anxiety to Build Trust in Antebellum Advertisements,” Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Philadelphia, PA; July 2017

Creative Works

“Small Tokens,” memories in tribute to Okla Elliot, Mayday Magazine 11 (2017).


Download full CV: Black CV for web 2022-23