Lawrence Hatter
Postdoctoral Fellow 
Ph.D., Early America; Atlantic World, University of Virginia, 2011
Office: Mack Social Sciences, MSS 243C
Phone: (775) 682-8994
Email: lhatter@unr.edu
My research and teaching broadly focuses on understanding the founding of the American Republic in an international context. By emphasizing connection and comparison in early American history, I aim for my students to gain a new insight into the founding period by exploring North America's place within the Revolutionary Atlantic World.
My current research project views the creation of an American national state in the West through the prism of the Laurentine trade. The merchants and traders engaged in the commerce of the extended St. Lawrence River valley (which linked the Atlantic entrepôt of Montreal to the vast riverine systems of the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri) occupied a borderlands space between sovereignties after the American Revolution. My work explores how the transnational community of Laurentine merchants and traders tried to maintain their liminal position between the American Republic and the British Empire while also seeking to shape the rival state-building projects pursued north and south of the Great Lakes.
Viewing state formation from a Laurentine perspective complicates what historians usually see as a straightforward, though contested, process: the creation of a sovereign, American national state in the late eighteenth-century. In doing so, my work argues that state formation was a lengthy and complex process that involved a wide array of activities. Indian removal, white settlement and deploying state power in politically expedient ways were essential to federal state formation, but diplomacy (e.g. the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the treaty of Ghent in 1814), commercial policy (e.g. the Customs Act of 1799 and the Jeffersonian embargo and intercourse acts) and changing definitions of citizenship were also part of the intricate process of creating an American national state in the West.
My essay "The Transformation of the Detroit Land Market and the Formation of the Anglo-American Boundary, 1783-1796" appeared in a special borderlands issue of the Michigan Historical Review in 2008, and I have articles forthcoming in both the American Review of Canadian Studies and Diplomatic History.
I have received research grants and fellowships from numerous sources, including Harvard Business School, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Government of Canada, the International Council for Canadian Studies, and the University of Michigan.