Richard D. Brown

Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History

Director: Humanities Institute

Office: Wood Hall, Room 232
Phone: (860) 486-3063
Fax: (860) 486-0641
Email:Richard.D.Brown@uconn.edu

Areas of Specialty

Colonies, Revolution, and Pre-Industrial Society and culture

Current Research Interests

Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Equality in Early America

Biography

Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, is a 1961 graduate of Oberlin College who attended Harvard on a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship, earning his Ph.D. in 1966. Before coming to the University of Connecticut in 1971, he taught as a Fulbright lecturer in France and at Oberlin College. His research and teaching interests have been in the political, social, and cultural history of early America. His current project, "The Challenge of Equality in the Early Republic," employs microhistory and narrative. A past president of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic and the New England Historical Association, Brown has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.

Selected Publications

The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), with Irene Quenzler Brown.

Massachusetts: A Concise History, with Jack Tager (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000)

Major Problems in the Era of The American Revolution, 1760-1791, edited, (Lexington, Mass.: D.C.Heath, 1992). Second edition, revised.(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996). Paperback edition 1997.

Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989). Paperback edition 1991.

Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976). Reissued by Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, Ill., 1988.

Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772-1774 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970). Paperback edition by W.W. Norton: New York, 1976.

"The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760-1820," Journal of American History, 61 (1974): 29-51.