Professor Brooke maintains
passworded webpage for each of his courses.
A Rough Journey
Professor John L. Brooke joined the department in 2001. He received his B.A. from Cornell University (1975) and
his M.A. (1977) and Ph.D. (1982) from the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught at Franklin and Marshall University, Amherst College, and Tufts University. He was named an O.S.U. Humanities Distinguished Professor in September 2003, and served as Vice Chair of the department from 2006 to 2008. In 2007-2008 he served as the president of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.
Brooke is the author of two books: The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political
Culture in Worcester County Massachusetts, 1713-1861(Cambridge University
Press, 1989) and The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology,
1644-1844 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). The Heart of the
Commonwealth won the Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History
from the Organization of American Historians and the National Historical
Society Book Prize for American History. The Refiner's Fire won the
Bancroft Prize for American History and the Society for Historians of
the Early American Republic Book Prize. His book manuscript, Columbia: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson, is being edited for publication by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/UNC Press. He is also working a manuscript titled "Habermas in Tocqueville’s America: Civil Society and the Public Sphere in Early America."
Brooke's most recent articles include his S.H.E.A.R. Presidential Address, "Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the Composite-Federal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis,”
Journal of the Early Republic , forthcoming, April 2009); "Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic," in Jeffery Pasley, Andrew Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds.,
Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (2004); "Ecology," in Daniel Vickers, ed.,
The Blackwell Companion to Colonial America (2003), and "'To be Read by the Whole People': Press, Party, and Public Sphere in the United States, 1789-1840,"
Proceeding of the American Antiquarian Society 110 (2000).
While his major field of interest is American political and social history from 1660-1860, he also has a long-standing teaching interest in global environmental history. In connection with this work he is a consultant for the N.S.F. funded O.S.U. "Project on European Health since the Paleolithic," and is currently revising a completed book manuscript on the long material and natural history of the human condition entitled "A Rough Journey: Human History and a Volatile Earth," under contract with Cambridge University Press.
He has written articles and book reviews for the William and Mary Quarterly, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Journal of Economic History, and Reviews in American History, among others.
Professor Brooke has won numerous grants and fellowships. He has been
a recipient of fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies and been
named a Senior Fellow at the Commonwealth Center/Institute of Early American History and
Culture at the College of William and Mary, and Fellow at the Charles Warren Center, Harvard University, and at the American Antiquarian Society.
His teaching interests include Early American society, religion, and
political culture, 1607-1861; Material Culture; and Global Environmental
History.
For graduate students preparing Major and Minor fields in Early American History, Professor Brooke recommends the list of following titles in addition to the list developed by the Early American Graduate Group.
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