Carolyn Eastman is an historian of early America up to the Civil War. She is a prizewinning author and professor who has written about about Americans’ fascination with Indian eloquence after the Revolution; schoolgirls’ vindications of female oratorical excellence; debates over the best means of advocating for world peace during the antebellum era; portrayals of masculinity and sexuality in popular texts about antebellum pirates; and anxious accounts of mixed-race families in Atlantic travelogues. Her 2021 book, The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity, re-creates the earliest decades of the 19th-century United States through the career of an remarkable figure known for his eloquence. Her 2009 book, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution, analyzes how non-elite women and men learned to think of themselves as being American after the Revolution. It received the James Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.