William S. Kiser

About the Author

William S. Kiser is a historian whose scholarship centers on the contested borderlands of the nineteenth-century American Southwest, where questions of captivity, peonage, and shifting legal regimes intersected with the expansion of the United States. Drawing on extensive archival research, he illuminates the lived experiences of enslaved and coerced peoples while tracing the political and economic forces that sustained unfree labor systems long after national emancipation. Kiser’s work challenges conventional regional boundaries and offers fresh perspectives on how slavery and its legacies persisted across the continent.