Heesoo Cho

I am a historian of early America, broadly defined as the history and cultures of North America from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. 

My research interests include maritime expansion, knowledge production, geographic imagination, and the making of “the global” in the early modern world. My current book project documents how early Americans engaged with the spaces that we now identify as the Pacific Ocean. It is primarily a cultural history of knowledge production pursued through the investigation of a broad range of print and visual materials – maps, business correspondence, logbooks, journals, and newspapers – produced and engaged by Europeans and Anglo-Americans to think about and with the Pacific. It is also a study of the considerable intellectual effort, lived experience, and political negotiation that constitute geographic imaginations of distant spaces and places in the early modern world. How Americans conceptualized the Pacific was essential to how they understood the North American mainland and their place in the world, and shaped the extent and limitations of American expansionism and imperialism in the early nineteenth century. 

At Davidson, I offer courses ranging from the survey course in early American history to seminars on the Age of Revolutions, maritime and oceanic worlds, spatial history, and knowledge production in the early modern world.