Jonathan D.S. Schroeder, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots

History as seen through the eyes of preeminent authors.

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The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography by John Swanson Jacobs
Edited by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian of literature, medicine, and emotion, and a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2016, in Australia, he rediscovered John Swanson Jacobs's long lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; republished by The University of Chicago Press in 2024 and profiled in The New York Times, NPR, and elsewhere, his edition features the first full-length biography of Harriet Jacobs's globe-spanning brother, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs. Schroeder is also the co-editor of Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Material Turn, and the co-director of Congress of the Birds, a 501(c)3 organization that annually rescues, rehabilitates, and releases over 1,000 of Rhode Island's native and migratory birds. The recipient of long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, Schroeder is currently editing Lauren Berlant: A Reader, writing and researching Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia, and planning and building a 42-acre forest wildlife rehabilitation center in Chepachet, Rhode Island.