He studies and teaches histories of childhood, race, and popular culture in the United States from the 1800s through the mid-1900s. His first book, Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the American Child, won the Children's Literature Association's 2015 Honor Book Award for "outstanding scholarship in the field of children's literature," and is available now. His current projects include a study of Boston’s Royal Rooters, one of the nation’s earliest groups of celebrity sports fans; and the William Penn Project, a service learning initiative through which High Point University students are researching and building a website on the history of the city’s all-black high school from 1892 through 1968.