Eric Herschthal is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, working under Prof. Christopher Leslie Brown. His interests include slavery, the history of science, Atlantic history, colonial America and the early republic.  He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton University in 2006, and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia in 2009.  Prior to entering Columbia’s history Ph.D. program in 2012, he worked as a journalist in New York. He continues to freelance and has been published in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and elsewhere.