Brown, Richard D(avid) 1939-

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BROWN, Richard D(avid) 1939-

PERSONAL: Born October 31, 1939, in New York, NY; son of Alvyn A. and Dorothy (a teacher in special education; maiden name, Kruskal) Brown; married Irene Quenzler (a teacher of history), June 10, 1962; children: Josiah Henry, Nicholas Alvyn. Education: Oberlin College, B.A., 1961; Harvard University, M.A., 1962, Ph.D., 1966.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of History, University of Connecticut, 241 Glenbrook Rd., Storrs, CT 06269-2103. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France, Fulbright fellow in history, 1965-66; Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, assistant professor of history, 1966-71; University of Connecticut, Storrs, associate professor of history, 1971—, chairman of department, 1974—, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History. University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, director. Research fellow, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, 1970-71. Clerk, Early Massachusetts Records, Inc.

MEMBER: Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, American Association of University Professors, Essex Institute, Association for the Study of Connecticut History (founding member).

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson dissertation fellow, 1961-62; Social Science Research Council faculty fellow, 1970-71; National Endowment for the Humanities grant as principal investigator for early Massachusetts records, 1974-75; Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, 1998-99.

WRITINGS:

Urbanization in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1790-1830, Connecticut Valley Historical Museum (Springfield, MA), 1962.

Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772-1774, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1970, Norton (New York, NY), 1976.

Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865, Hill and Wang (New York, NY), 1976.

Massachusetts: A Bicentennial History, Norton (New York, NY), 1978.

Knowledge Is Power, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1996.

(With Jack Tager) Massachusetts: A Concise History, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 2001.

(With wife, Irene Quenzler Brown) The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America, Belknap Press of Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), 2003.

Contributor to New England Quarterly, Journal of American History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, William and Mary Quarterly, and other journals.

EDITOR

The Encyclopedia of New England, Facts on File (New York, NY), 1985.

Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791: Documents and Essays, D.C. Heath (Lexington, MA), 1992, 2nd edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2000.

(With Milton M. Klein and John B. Hench) The Republican Synthesis Revisited: Essays in Honor of George Athan Billias, American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA), 1992.

(With Lawrence B. Goodheart and Stephen G. Rabe) Slavery in American Society, D.C. Heath (Lexington, MA), 1992.

SIDELIGHTS: Richard D. Brown is a distinguished professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, whose books and areas of research deal with early American social and cultural history. Working both as writer and editor, Brown has tackled the spread of information in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Knowledge Is Power; has chronicled the history of one of the first states in Massachusetts: A Bicentennial History and in Massachusetts: A Concise History; has looked at social change in Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865; and has also dealt with slavery in Slavery in American Society. Freedom of information and political participation are the themes of his 1996 work The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870, and in the 2003 title The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America, Brown teams up with his wife to explore the nature of justice in the early nineteenth century.

In The Strength of a People, Brown asks three major questions, according to Dan M. Hockman in the Historian: "Who should be informed? Of what should they be informed? How should they be informed?" Brown's investigation begins with Tudor-Stuart England, and he notes that already by this time the idea of an informed citizenry was a fait accompli. During the Revolutionary period in America, such an informed public was also found to be a benefit, and the principles of a free press and public education were therefore established along with the new republic. Education in particular became vital during the course of the nineteenth century, Brown shows, and as suffrage widened, so too did the idea of universal education. Brown follows the debate up to modern times and finds that information for an informed citizenry is still woefully inadequate, with opinion counting higher than real facts for most voters. Hockman went on in the Historian to call Brown's study both "thoroughly researched" and "highly readable," and further noted that it "not only illuminates the past but suggests a rare insight into the present." Ron Formisano, writing in the American Historical Review, also had praise for The Strength of a People, calling it an "excellent book [that] is illuminating and provocative." Simon P. Newman, writing in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, similarly found the book to be "concise and well-crafted." Newman described the work as "intellectual history of a high caliber," yet also commented that a "more interdisciplinary approach might have complicated [Brown's] findings in revealing and useful ways." Despite this reservation, Newman felt that Brown's work was an "excellent and suggestive history of ideas."

In 1998 Brown won a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue research on a book that examined capital punishment in early America. Brown took an incest rape trial that occurred in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, in 1805 as a microcosm of early justice in the United States. In this trial Ephraim Wheeler was found guilty of the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy, and then executed in 1806, after many, including both his wife and daughter, attempted to intervene on his behalf. "'What drew me to the Wheeler case was the readiness of a young woman to send her father to the gallows,'" Brown told Luis Mocete of Advance Online. "'That must have been quite a burden to her.'" Further inspiration came from the O. J. Simpson case of the mid-1990s. "'In both cases you are talking about families that have gone deeply wrong, and in which violence is playing a profound role,'" Brown explained to Mocete. Collaborating with his wife, Irene Quenzler Brown, a fellow historian and professor of family studies at the University of Connecticut, Brown presents in The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler a "richly nuanced account" of the trial and its aftermath, according to Michael Kenney in the Boston Globe. Wheeler, a poor, illiterate, white farmer, married Hannah, a woman of color, and had two children, daughter Betsy and a son. The husband and wife did not get along together; Hannah was often abused by her husband. When Betsy was thirteen, Wheeler took her and her brother with him and left Hannah. Not far from the family home, he raped his daughter and then sent the children back to their mother. When Betsy told her story and also related that her father had assaulted her twice before, Wheeler was brought into custody. However, he continued to protest, even on the gallows, that he was innocent. To him, the fact that Betsy had finally "consented" after being overpowered proved that the act was consensual. The subsequent trial became a surrogate drama for the local citizenry; five thousand were on hand to watch him hang for his crime. This was the first hanging for rape in a quarter of a century in Massachusetts.

Lester P. Lee, Jr., reviewing the Browns' book in Times Literary Supplement, felt that the authors "capture in vivid detail how the social forces of family, religion, class, race, and the State in the early American republic shaped Wheeler's fate." Lee concluded that the book was "very insightful." Kenney also commended the "color and vibrancy" with which the authors detail their work. For Michael F. Russo, writing in Library Journal, the book "reads like TheCrucible meets In Cold Blood." Russo also thought The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler was a "very worthy treatment of an important and timeless topic." Bryce Christensen, writing in Booklist, found the book a "forceful reminder" of this country's long debate over capital punishment, and Sarah F. Gold, reviewing the book for Publishers Weekly, similarly commented that the Browns "effectively demonstrate that there were never uncomplicated solutions to . . . family violence and criminal justice."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, April, 1997, Ron Formisano, review of The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870, pp. 513-514.

Booklist, April 15, 2003, Bryce Christensen, review of The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America, p. 1430.

Boston Globe, April 15, 2003, Michael Kenney, review of The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, p. E5.

Historian, winter, 1998, Dan M. Hockman, review of The Strength of a People, pp. 381-382.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, summer, 1997, Simon P. Newman, review of The Strength of a People, pp. 144-145.

Library Journal, Michael F. Russo, review of The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, p. 133.

Publishers Weekly, March 10, 2003, Sarah F. Gold, review of The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, p. 68. Times Literary Supplement, August 22, 2003, Lester P. Lee, Jr., review of The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, p. 25.