Whether it appears in the fire and brimstone rhetoric of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons, the doomsday paranoia of the Nuclear Age, or the season-to-season calamities of television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the apocalypse has endured in the American popular imagination. My current research project examines the apocalypse as one of America’s foundational conceptual categories. In particular, I consider the ways in which representations of apocalypse help to structure and inform nineteenth-century discourses on race and slavery. By carefully attending to the writings and performances of figures such as Nat Turner, David Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and Frances Harper, I aim to demonstrate how the apocalypse is a vital, and often inextricable, organizing principle that shapes the way race and slavery are understood in this period.