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Douglas Bradburn

Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2003
Early American, Early Modern Britain, Comparative Slavery/Emancipation

 
Office: LT 703  
Phone: (607) 777-4424 E-mail: bradburn@binghamton.edu

Upstate Early American Workshop

A historian of early American history, my current research interests relate to problems of citizenship, federalism, and the creation of the American state in the era of the American revolution, the religious commitments of the early promoters of colonization of Virginia, and the society and economy of late seventeenth century Virginia. My forthcoming book, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Making of the American Union, argues that the local control of the ultimate meaning of American citizenship in the early republic represented the fruits of a political settlement. This arrangement finally ended a crisis of authority, allegiance, and sovereignty that had exploded in the American independence movement and was delicately resolved in the first years of the nineteenth century. My graduate classes provide an intensive emersion in the significant problems and historiographical trends in early American, early modern and Atlantic history. My undergraduate classes introduce students to the rigor of historical method by encouraging the interpretation of primary documents, the production of clear, cogent, writing and the mastery of defining and solving historical problems through research.

Recent or current undergraduate courses:

  • Politics and Society in Colonial America, 1607-1763
  • Revolutionary America
  • Foundations of America

Recent or current graduate courses:

  • Problems in the Era of the American Revolution

Significant Publications

Books:

  • The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Making of the American Union. (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming).
  • Early Modern Virginia: New Essays on the Old Dominion , editor, with John C. Coombs (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming).

Recent Articles and Working Papers:

  • "A Clamor in the Public Mind: The Opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, LXV (July 2008), 565-600.
  • "Smoke and Mirrors: Reinterpreting the Society and Economy of the 17th Century Chesapeake," with John C. Coombs, Atlantic Studies, Vol. 3 (October 2006): 131-157.
  • "’True Americans’ and ‘Hordes of Foreigners’: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and the Problem of Citizenship in the United States, 1789-1800," Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, Vol. 29 (Spring, 2003): 19-41.
  • "Immigrants, Federalists, and the Politics of National Citizenship in the United States, 1789-1800," Working Paper No. 01-07, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Harvard University, 2001.

Representative Book Reviews:

  • Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America, H-Atlantic
  • C. Edward Skeen, 1816: America Rising, in Journal of the Early Republic, (Fall, 2004).
  • Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, in Journal of the Early Republic, (Winter, 2002).
  • Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood, in The Southern Historian, Vol. XXI, (Tuscaloosa, AL) 2001, 122-125.

Editorial Work:

  • Senior Associate Editor, The Southern Historian Tuscaloosa, AL, June 1999-2003.

Recent Grants and Fellowships

  • Gilder Lehrman Junior Research Fellowship, Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello, 2004-2005.
  • Mellon Fellow, Virginia Historical Society
  • Newberry Library Undergraduate Humanities Seminar Faculty Fellowship, 2003-2004.
  • CBS Bicentennial Narrators Scholarship, Division of Humanities, University of Chicago, 2002-2003.
  • Von Holst Prize Lectureship University of Chicago, 2001-2002.
  • Summer Pre-Dissertation Research Grant, University of Chicago History Department, 1998.
  • University of Chicago Graduate Studies Fellowship, 1995-1999.
  • Raven Society Research Fellowship, University of Virginia, 1994-1995.
  • Anne Hope Van Schaack Award for Jefferson Studies, University of Virginia, for paper “‘Farming is But Gambling’: Thomas Jefferson’s Plantations in Retirement,” 1994.