Donna Rilling

My focus is early American history, particularly the period of the Early Republic (loosely, the 1780s–1850s), but my teaching spans the colonial period through the Civil War. My teaching and research interests revolve around the organization of work, business, and the economy, including entrepreneurship and small business; free and enslaved labor; household production and gender work roles; technological change; comparative industrialization; the relationship between legal institutions and social and economic developments; and commerce and capitalism.