Positions
Education
Areas of Specialization:
Colonial and Revolutionary United States
Research Interests:
Revolutionary America, Pennsylvania before 1800, the Second Amendment, Masculinity and the Militia, race and slavery, gender and sexuality
Current & Future Research:
Arms and the Men: Masculinity and the Militia in the Early Republic (proposed book manuscript/SSHRC grant)
Assistant Editor, The John Dickinson Writings Project,http://dickinsonproject.rch.uky.edu/
Publications
(Selected)
BOOKS:
(Assistant Editor) The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, Vols. 1 & 2 (University of Delaware Press, 2020-21).
Benjamin Franklin: American Founder, Atlantic Citizen. Routledge, 2014.
(with Saul Cornell, eds.) The Second Amendment on Trial: Critical Essays on District of Columbia v. Heller. University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.
ARTICLES/CHAPTERS/BRIEFS:
“Rethinking Originalism: Bearing Arms and Armed Resistance in Pennsylvania,”American Journal of Legal History 56 (Winter 2016): 1-14.
“'Falling Under the Domination Totally of Presbyterians:' The Paxton Riots and the Coming of the Revolution in Pennsylvania” in William Pencak, ed., Pennsylvania's Revolution (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 7- 35.
(with Jane Calvert) “Brief of Historians on Early American Legal, Constitutional and Pennsylvania History as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondent City of Chicago,” McDonald v. City of Chicago (No. 08-1521).
“Originalism in a Digital Age,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (Winter 2009): 585- 606.
“Originalism, History, and the Second Amendment: What Did Bearing Arms Really Mean to the Founders?” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 10 (2008): 413-446.
“Defending Themselves: The Original Understanding of the Right to Bear Arms” Rutgers Law Journal 39 (2008): 1041-1070.
GRADUATE MAJOR RESEARCH PAPER SUPERVISIONS:
Rebecca Dubeau, “Rioting and Reporting: Representations of Race in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Defender During the 1919 Chicago Race Riot” (2020)
An Nguyen, “If There’s Still Việt Cộng, Then I Will Never Return:” Understanding the Vietnamese Diaspora Through Memories of Food, Work, and Nation” (2019)
Carolyne Ticky, “Just Afflictions: Representations of Identity, Illness and Pain in Four Seventeenth-Century English Diaries (second reader, 2018)
Lauren Edwards, A Union Through Chains: Slavery and Meanings of the United States Constitution (2016)
Rachel Loewen, “No officer . . . will forget that the soldier is like himself a man” : American Citizen-Soldiers in a Democratizing Nation, 1812-1815 (2016)
Lesley Kimewon, Kina dnwendagnag miigsaabiigan miinwaa niizhswasebboon gii miigaading, Wampum belts: all my relations and the Seven Years' War (2016)
Peter Brath, “A luxurious, lazy, idle, and effeminate people”: manhood, property, and race in Trustee Georgia, 1731-1752 (2014)