T.H. Breen

T.H. Breen is a professor of American History at the University of Vermont and an Early American historian interested in the history of political thought, material culture, and cultural anthropology.

A Guggenheim fellow, he has held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study and the National Humanities Center as well as the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University and the Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford University. He has won several awards for distinguished teaching, including one from the Northwestern Alumni Society. His publications include five monographs, among them Tobacco Culture: the Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (recipient of the T. Saloutos Prize) and Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories (winner of the Historical Preservation Book Prize), as well as portions of the highly successful undergraduate text, America: Past and Present. Breen published Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, with Oxford University Press, and won the Colonial War Society Prize for the best book in 2004 on the American Revolution.

A recent recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Award from the German government and a Fellowship from the Max Planck Institute, he has now completed a book entitled American Insurgents -- American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (2010). He published George Washington’s Journey: The President Forges a New Nation, which won the Society of the Cincinnati Award in 2016 and is a finalist for the 2017 George Washington Prize.

In 2014 and 2015 he served as a special consultant for Colonial Williamsburg and held the Rockefeller Fellowship. In 2017 he was appointed the John Kluge Professor of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress. He is currently working on a book for Harvard Press entitled “An Appeal to Heaven: The American Revolution.” A book of essays in his honor authored by his graduate students will be published by the University of Virginia in July 2017.

Breen is the founding director of the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, and has a Ph.D. from Yale.

Articles by this Author

George Washington's Journey, Special Issue - George Washington Prize 2017 | Vol. 62, No. 4

After becoming president, George Washington undertook an extraordinary journey through all 13 colonies to unite – and learn from – a diverse population of citizens. His quest to unite the nation and discover the "temper and disposition" of its people are an inspiration to us today.

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