Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War

Yale University Press, 2017.

A detailed and compelling examination of how the early Republic struggled with the idea that “all men are created equal.”

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For more information, including a full description, reviews, and purchasing options,
please click here to visit the Self-Evident Truths page.

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Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760 - 1791 (3rd Edition)

Co-edited with Benjamin L. Carp. Cengage Publishing, 2014.

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the Major Problems in American History series introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history. Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 3rd Edition, delves into the many facets of the colonial uprising and its aftermath, concluding with the ratification of the Bill of Rights. The volume combines primary sources, analytical essays, chapter introductions, and headnotes to encourage students to think critically about the revolutionary era. The 3rd Edition contains expanded regional coverage beyond the Eastern seaboard and updated scholarship throughout the text.

Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic

with Doron S. Ben-Atar. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

The political upheaval of the American Revolution and the new republic created new kinds of cultural experience—both exciting and frightening—at a moment when New England farmers and village elites were contesting long-standing assumptions about divine creation and the social order. Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown offer a rare and vivid perspective on anxieties about sexual and social deviance in the early republic.

Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy

Co-edited with Richard Ashby Wilson. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Humanitarian sentiments have motivated a variety of manifestations of pity, from nineteenth-century movements to end slavery to the creation of modern international humanitarian law. While humanitarianism is clearly political, Humanitarianism and Suffering addresses the ways in which it is also an ethos embedded in civil society, one that drives secular and religious social and cultural movements, not just legal and political institutions. As an ethos, humanitarianism has a strong narrative and representational dimension that can generate humanitarian constituencies for particular causes. The emotional nature of compassion is closely linked to visual and literary images of suffering and innocence. Essays in this volume analyze the character, form, and voice of private or public narrative themselves and explain how and why some narratives of suffering energize political movements of solidarity, whereas others do not. Humanitarianism and Suffering explores when, how, and why humanitarian movements become broadly popular. It shows how public sentiment moves political and social elites to action and, conversely, how national elites appropriate humanitarian ideals for more instrumental ends.

The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America

with Irene Quenzler Brown. Harvard University Press, 2005.

In 1806 an anxious crowd of thousands descended upon Lenox, Massachusetts, for the public hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. Not all witnesses believed justice had triumphed. The death penalty had become controversial; no one had been executed for rape in Massachusetts in more than a quarter century. Wheeler maintained his innocence. Over one hundred local citizens petitioned for his pardon—including, most remarkably, Betsy and her mother.

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Impoverished, illiterate, a failed farmer who married into a mixed-race family and clashed routinely with his wife, Wheeler existed on the margins of society. Using the trial report to reconstruct the tragic crime and drawing on Wheeler’s jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America. They imaginatively and sensitively explore issues of family violence, poverty, gender, race and class, religion, and capital punishment, revealing similarities between death penalty politics in America today and two hundred years ago.

Beautifully crafted, engagingly written, this unforgettable story probes deeply held beliefs about morality and about the nature of justice.

Massachusetts: A Concise History

with Jack Tager. University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

In this book, Richard D. Brown and Jack Tager survey the rich heritage of Massachusetts as a distinctive, and distinctly American, state, showing how it has long exerted an influence disproportionate to its size. A seedbed of revolt against British colonial rule, Massachusetts has supplied the nation with a long line of political leaders—from Samuel and John Adams to William Lloyd Garrison and Lucy Stone to John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy. Its early textile mills helped shape the industrial revolution, while its experiences with urbanization, immigration, ethnic conflict, and labor strife reflected the growth of the national economy. In the twentieth century, the state continued to lead the country through a series of wrenching economic changes as it moved from the production of goods to the provision of services, eventually becoming a center of the high-tech revolution in telecommunications. If there is one common theme in the Bay State's history, Brown and Tager make clear, it is the capacity to adapt to change. In part this trait can be attributed to the state's unique blend of resources, including its many distinguished colleges and universities. But it can also be credited to the people themselves, who have created a singular sense of place by reconciling claims of tradition with the possibilities of innovation. This book tells their story.

The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870

University of North Carolina Press, 1996

Thomas Jefferson's conviction that the health of the nation's democracy would depend on the existence of an informed citizenry has been a cornerstone of our political culture since the inception of the American republic. In this book, Richard Brown traces the development of the ideal of an informed citizenry in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and assesses its continuing influence and changing meaning. Although the concept had some antecedents in Europe, the full articulation of the ideal relationship between citizenship and knowledge came during the era of the American Revolution. The founding fathers believed that the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press, religion, speech, and assembly would foster an informed citizenry. According to Brown, many of the fundamental institutions of American democracy and society, including political parties, public education, the media, and even the postal system, have enjoyed wide government support precisely because they have been identified as vital for the creation and maintenance of an informed populace.

Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865

Oxford University Press, 1991

Knowledge is Power provides fresh insights into the foundations of American pluralism and deepens our perspective on the character of public communications in the United States. Richard D. Brown here explores America's first communications revolution--the revolution that made printed goods and public oratory widely available and, by means of the steamboat, railroad and telegraph, sharply accelerated the pace at which information traveled. He describes the day-to-day experiences of dozens of men and women, and in the process illuminates the social dimensions of this profound, far-reaching transformation. Brown begins in Massachusetts and Virginia in the early 18th century, when public information was the precious possession of the wealthy, learned, and powerful, who used it to reinforce political order and cultural unity. Employing diaries and letters to trace how information moved through society during seven generations, he explains that by the Civil War era, cultural unity had become a thing of the past.