Staff
Freedmen and Southern Society Project Staff
James Illingworth, project director
jillingw@umd.edu
301.405.4310
James Illingworth is a documentary editor and historian specializing in slavery and emancipation. Since 2015, he has been a member of the editorial team of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP), housed in the History Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Illingworth joined the project as assistant editor, was promoted to associate editor in 2023, and in 2025 became project director and principal investigator. In addition to overseeing the project’s administrative and scholarly direction, he serves as lead editor for a forthcoming volume of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. This volume focuses on Black family and kinship in the U.S. South following the destruction of slavery, contributing to ongoing scholarship on social reproduction, emancipation, and Reconstruction-era social history.
William Horne, assistant editor
whorne@umd.edu
301.405.4275
William Horne is a historian of white supremacy and Black liberation movements in the United States. His recent scholarly publications include “White Supremacy and Fraud: The ‘Abolitionist’ Work of Henry Frisbie,” Civil War History 70 no. 3, (September 2024): 69-86; “Abaline Miller and the Struggle for Justice against the Employer Police State after Slavery,” in The Civil War Era and the Summer of 2020, Andy Slap and Hilary Green, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), 38-46; “Necessary Utopias: Black Agitation and Human Survival,” Green Theory & Praxis 16 no. 1 (February 2024): 14-33; and “Towards an Unpatriotic Education: Du Bois, Woodson, and the Threat of Nationalist Mythologies,” Journal of Academic Freedom 13 (2022): 1-16. His current book project, “Carnivals of Violence,” examines Reconstruction through the lens of colonialism.
Horne was co-founder and longtime editor of The Activist History Review and has spoken and published extensively in public-facing venues including TIME, Truthout, The Nation, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, and the Bucks County Beacon.
The Freedmen and Southern Society Project is a part of the History Department of the University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.