Adam Smith
Professorial Fellow; Edward Orsborn Professor of US Politics and Political History
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I am the Edward Orsborn Professor of US Politics & Political History and the Director of the聽. I was born in the Northeast of England and went to Durham Johnston Comprehensive School and then to Oxford, Sheffield, Harvard and Cambridge universities. I taught for sixteen years at UCL before taking up my current position at Oxford.
My specialism is the American Civil War, its causes and consequences, but more broadly I am interested in democratic politics in various settings.
I regularly聽聽on BBC Radio and write for various magazines and websites. (You can read some recent articles聽.) I also have a close interest in school history teaching. I worked on education policy for the Royal Historical Society, and developed an undergraduate course at UCL in which students created and delivered a sequence of lessons to Key Stage 3 pupils.
Teaching
I teach the United States history papers at undergraduate and masters level and supervise doctoral students working on various topics in nineteenth-century US history.
Research
My principal area of research explores the relationship between ideas and political behaviour. My aim in recent books and articles has been to offer an analysis of political change grounded in how 鈥榦rdinary鈥� people in the nineteenth century experienced and understood their world. My first book,聽No Party Now聽(Oxford University Press, 2006),聽analysed the tensions between wartime pressure for conformity and the practice of electoral politics. In 2017, the University of North Carolina Press published聽, (2017). This book won the Jefferson Davis Prize, awarded by the American Civil War museum in Richmond for the best book on the Civil War era, and was a finalist for the Lincoln prize for the best book on Lincoln or the Civil War soldier, awarded by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History. It offers a new view of the northern path to war, focusing on the mass of northern voters who self-defined as 鈥榗onservatives鈥� and whose shifting responses to the unfolding political crises shaped events more than is usually appreciated.
Another strand of my research focuses on the study of the image of the United States around the world. On this theme my most recent publication is an article about the 鈥榗ult鈥� of Abraham Lincoln in interwar Britain, which appeared in the journal聽Twentieth Century British History.聽I am currently completing a book for OUP on the battle of Gettysburg in history and memory which, among other things, situates the meanings of that great battle in a transnational context. I also have academic interests in the history of theatre and in transatlantic liberalism and conservatism in the nineteenth century.
Selected Publications
The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846-1865.聽Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North.聽New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Practicing Democracy: Re-thinking Popular Politics in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 2015, edited with Daniel Peart.
America Imagined: Explaining the United States in Nineteenth Century Europe and Latin America.聽New York: Palgrave, 2012, edited with Axel Korner and Nicola Miller.
The American Civil War.聽Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 275 pp.
鈥淏eyond the Realignment Synthesis: The Election of 1860 Reconsidered鈥� in聽America at the Ballot Box: Elections in American Political History,聽edited by Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 59-76
鈥淭he Fortunate Banner: Languages of Democracy in the United States, c1848,鈥� in Joanna Innes and Mark Philp, eds,聽Re-Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750-1850.聽Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 28-39
鈥淭he Politics of Theatrical Reform in Victorian America,鈥澛�American Nineteenth Century History聽13:3 (2012): 321-346.
鈥淭he 鈥楥ult鈥� of Abraham Lincoln and the Strange Survival of Liberal England in the Era of the World Wars,鈥� Twentieth Century British History聽21: 4 (2010)