Brian Schoen

Education

• Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia
• M.A. in History from the University of Virginia
• B.A. from the University of Arkansas

Research

• Nineteenth Century United States; Early Republic and Civil War
• United States and the World
• Political Economy

Brian Schoen (pronounced SHANE) is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History and the James Richard Hamilton/Baker and Hostetler Professor of Humanities.

His research and teaching focus on the political, social, economic, and intellectual history of the early United States from its early struggles through its near dissolution during the Civil War. His research examines how international developments shaped regional perception, politics, commitment or opposition to slavery, and relationships to and within the federal union.

Before coming to Ohio University in 2006, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and taught at Georgetown University and California State University, Sacramento. In Fall 2023 Schoen was the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Transnational Histories of North America, 1763-1877 at the University of Calgary. In 2014-15, he was the Fulbright-sponsored Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History, at the University College, Dublin. He is on the editorial board for the Journal of the Early Republic and also coedits Ohio University Press’s series, New Approaches to Midwestern Studies.

He has presented to a variety of forums domestically and abroad including C-Span, WOUB-NPR affiliate and the HISTORY Hub. His book-length study of the statecraft of the sectional and secession crisis of 1860-1861 has been funded by the National Endowment for the

Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the Filson Institute, and an Ohio University Baker Fund Grant.

Books

• The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War, (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Winner of the 2010 Southern Historical Association's Bennett H. Wall Award
• The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (Oxford University Press), co-edited with Frank Towers and L. Diane Barnes.
• Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era (The University of Virginia Press, 2015), co-edited with Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onuf.
• A Continent in Crisis: The U.S. Civil War in North America (Fordham University Press, in-press) co-edited with Jewel Spangler and Frank Towers.
• Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond (Ohio University Press, 2023) co-edited with Timothy Anderson. Ohio Center of the Book’s selection for Great Books from Great Place Selection, Library of Congress, National Book Festival.

Recent Articles and Book Chapters

• “Containing Empire: The United States and the World in the Civil War Era,” for Mark Philip Bradley, (general editor) The Cambridge History of America in the World, Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century, eds. Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
• “Francis Lieber on Institutional Liberty, Secession, and the Modern State,” American Political Thought, (University of Chicago Press) 9:4 (Fall 2020), 513-541.
• “The Civil War in Europe,” in The Cambridge History of the American Civil War, Volume 2: Affairs of the State, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
• “Lower South Jeffersonians: States and the Federal Imagination,” in Jeffersonians in Power: Ideas in Practice, eds. Joanne Freeman and Johann Neem (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019).
• “How Cotton Wove Together a Secession Coalition.” in Major Problems in American History, eds. Elizabeth Cobbs and Edward J. Blum, 4th edition (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2017), I: 386-393. Excerpted portions of The Fragile Fabric of Union.
• “Southern Wealth and Global Profits: Cotton, Economic Culture, and the Coming of the Civil War,” in The Transnational Significance of the American Civil War, edited by Jörg Nagler, Don Doyle, and Marcus Graeser, Palgrave-Macmillan Press. Transnational History Series, (eds. Rana Mitter and Akirya Iriye), 2017.
• “The Political Economies of Secession.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 37:2 (June 2015): 203-219.
• “The Statecraft of Secession and War: How Foreign Powers Unintentionally Shaped the Start of War,” in The American Civil War in a Global Context, edited by Peter Stearns (Richmond, VA: Sesquicentennial Commission, 2015): 16-26.
• “The Fate of Republics and Empires Hang in the Balance: The United States and Europe during the Civil War Era.” Organization of American Historians, Magazine of History 27:2 (April, 2013): 41-47.

Teaching

• HIST 2000: Survey of United States History, 1600-1877
• HIST 2300: Capitalism and Its Critics: An Intellectual History
• HIST 3008/5008: Early U.S. Republic (Age of Hamilton and Jackson)
• HIST 3018/5018: History of the American South to 1900
• HIST 3081/5081: The Civil War and its Aftermath
• HIST 3111J: Historical Research and Writing
• HIST 5081: The Civil War and its Aftermath
• HIST 6901: Graduate Colloquium in US History

In addition to his regular course offerings, Schoen routinely offers Honors Tutorials in these and related areas, graduate independent studies, and M.A. thesis supervision in 19th-century U.S. history and related fields.