Calvin Schermerhorn (born 1975) is an American historian who specializes in the study of slavery, capitalism, and African-American inequality.
[1] In 2012, he annotated a newly recovered slave narrative by a man named Henry Goings, at which time Schermerhorn told a reporter, "The 'Old South' of Hollywood legend was actually a very new place by the time Goings was taken to Tennessee and Alabama in the 1820s and when he escaped from Alabama in the 1830s.
"[2] His 2015 The Business of Slavery was about "how specific decisions and adaptations of individual slavers to changing conditions helped create an American empire of slavery,"[3] and "belies the alleged moral divide between the North and the South by reconstructing interregional and global networks of finance, charting the voluntary and coerced movement of people from northern to southern states, and highlighting the southern business ventures of northern capitalists.
"[5] In 2019, following a spike in interest in the slave traders Franklin & Armfield, Schermerhorn observed that they were men who bragged "about raping enslaved people" but for decades if not centuries, standard American histories "let them off scot-free.
"[8] Schermerhorn was awarded a Fulbright in 2021 to continue his study of "Slavery, Capitalism, and Inequality in the Anglophone Atlantic World" in the United Kingdom.