Faculty
Harriet E. Amos Doss, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Emory University
hdoss@uab.edu
Harriet E. Amos Doss, a historian of the United States from 1815 to 1877, pursues research analyzing race relations in religious matters during Reconstruction after the Civil War in Alabama and Mississippi to explain blacks' shift from membership in biracial to all-black churches. By studying the records of local churches and plantations, she delineates nuances that have been overlooked by general, and often superficial, studies of the region. She sheds light on the crucial period of development for the religious, social, and political power of the black church in the black community and in larger society. Her article, "Religious Reconstruction, in Microcosm at Faunsdale Plantation," won the 1990 Milo B. Howard Award of the Alabama Historical Association for the outstanding article published in the journal for the preceding two years. In addition to her research into the area of emancipation, Dr. Doss is also writing a history of frontier Alabama. This work builds upon her book, Cotton City: Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile (1985 and reprinted in 2001). In conjunction with the tricentennial of Mobile's founding, she is publishing an essay in a book and another in a journal as well as appearing in a television documentary. Grants from the American Association for the State and Local History and the National Endowment for the Humanities have supported Dr. Doss' research.
For questions concerning her research, please contact Dr. Doss.
