Willamette University

History

Seth Cotlar

Seth Cotlar

Education

  • B. A. Brown University
  • Ph. D. Northwestern University

Research and Teaching

Professor Cotlar specializes in the history of the United States in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War.  His first book - Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Trans-Atlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic - won the Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.  He is currently working on a new book project, a cultural history of nostalgia in modernizing America, 1776-1865.

Courses Recently Taught

HIST 131 - The Abolition of Slavery (to be offered in spring 2013)
HIST 131 - The Meaning of Democracy in the Age of the American Founding
HIST 302 - Foundations of American Thought
HIST 309 - History of American Radicalism
HIST 312 - The Early American Republic
HIST 342 - History of American Conservatism (to be offered in spring 2013)
HIST 361 - African-American History, 1619-1865
HIST 367 - The American Revolution
HIST 444 - Seminar on Historiography

Selected Publications

    
 “Languages of Democracy in America from the Revolution to the Election of 1800,” in Mark Philp and Joanna Innes, eds., Democracy from Book to Life: Language and Practice in the North Atlantic, 1750-1850 (Under contract with Oxford University Press, scheduled for publication in 2013.)
 
“Thomas Paine in the Atlantic Historical Imagination,” essay to be included in Peter Onuf and Simon Newman, eds., Tom Paine and the Revolutionary Atlantic (Under contract with University of Virginia Press, scheduled for publication in 2013).

“The View from Mount Vernon versus The People Out of Doors: Context and Conflict in the Ratification Debates” and “Narrative, Interpretation, and the People’s Debate over the Constitution,” contributions to a forum on Pauline Maier, Ratification in the William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 2 (April 2012): 369-72 and 395-97.
 
“Property for All: Robert Coram and the American Revolution’s Legacy of Economic Populism,” in Alfred Young, Gary Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation.  (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 339-55.
 
"Becoming Modern: Nostalgia reminds us of what we have lost in the wake of progress," Oregon Humanities, (Spring 2009), 15-21.
 
“Reading the Foreign News, Imagining an American Public Sphere: The Democratic-Republican Societies in Trans-Atlantic Context, 1793-1798.”  In Sharon Harris and Mark Kamrath, eds., Periodical Literature in Eighteenth Century America.  Knoxville, Tn.: University of Tennessee Press (2004), 307-338.
 
“The Federalists' Transatlantic Cultural Offensive of 1798 and the Moderation of American Democratic Discourse.”  In Jeffrey Pasley, Andrew Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders:  The New Political History of the Early American Republic.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (2004), 274-299.
 
“Joseph Gales and the Making of the Jeffersonian Middle Class.” In James Horn, Jan Lewis, and Peter Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800:  Democracy, Race, and the New Republic.  Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press (2002), 331-359.