Sally Hadden

Dr. Sally Hadden is a professor in the Department of History at Western Michigan University.

Hadden writes about and researches law and history in early America. She has published one monograph as a solo author: Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Harvard University Press, 2001).

She has co-edited or co-authored three additional books:

• Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History, with Patricia Minter (University of Georgia Press, 2013).
• A Companion to American Legal History, with Al Brophy (Wiley Blackwell, 2013).
• Traveling the Beaten Path: Charles Tait’s Charges to Federal Grand Juries, 1822-1825, with David Durham and Paul Pruitt (University of Alabama School of Law/University of Alabama Press, 2013).

She is working on two projects: a monograph on eighteenth-century lawyers in colonial American cities, and a study of the earliest U.S. Supreme Court (with Maeva Marcus, under contract with Cambridge University Press).

Hadden teaches general education and upper level undergraduate courses on American history on topics ranging from legal history and colonial America to research methods and the Civil War. She leads readings and research seminars for graduate students, in addition to teaching historiography from time to time. Her graduate students have completed theses in a number of areas, including the history of the book, the early American navy, religion and the Northwest Ordinance, and studies of territorial Florida and Michigan.

In 2017, she was interviewed for the video Preserved Identity about an artifact located at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington DC).

Hadden's 2023-2024 National Humanities Fellowship work is highlighted here: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/featured-research-balancing-the-scales/.