Rachel Tamar Van is an Associate Professor of early American history at Cal Poly Pomona. She specializes in American merchant capitalism in the late 18th - early 19th centuries with a particular emphasis on family capitalism and Americans in the Pacific.
She received her Ph.D. in United States history from Columbia University. She was fortunate to receive the Bancroft Dissertation Award for 2011. Her manuscript, "Family Capital: Yankee Merchant Networks and the Shaping of the Global Economy," is currently under revision.
