Richard Brown

Professor Emeritus, History, Storrs campus

Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, 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.   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. He currently serves as president of New England Quarterly, owner and publisher of that journal. Most recently he is the author of Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017).  He is also the author of Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865  and The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870.   With Irene Quenzler Brown, he is the co-author of The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America.

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