Richard D. Brown

Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, Emeritus, is a 1961 graduate of Oberlin College who attended Harvard on a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship, earning a 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. Brown’s 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 is the author of Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (1989); The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 (1996); and Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (2017). 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 (2003).