Mark Schmeller
Associate Professor, History
Director of Undergraduate Studies, History
Degree
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2001
Specialties
United States political and intellectual history, 18th and 19th centuries; communications history; legal history; political thought; Atlantic World.
Biography
Mark Schmeller is a historian of early American and United
States political thought and culture with particular interests in law,
communications, and political economy. He is the author of Invisible
Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction.
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2016, Invisible Sovereign
locates the origins of the concept of public opinion in the eighteenth-century
rejection of fear as a legitimate instrument of government, and traces its development
through debates over public credit, partisanship, honor and dueling, moral and
religious psychology, and slavery. Schmeller has received fellowships from the
Mellon Foundation, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Charles Warren
Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. He is currently
at work on a history of the 1826 kidnapping and murder of William Morgan, a
Freemason who had threatened to reveal the secrets of the fraternal order.
Courses Offered
American History to 1865
The Age of Jefferson and Jackson
Atlantic Revolutions
Conspiracy Theories in U.S.
History
The World of Alexander Hamilton
Foundations of American
Political Thought
The Civil War and Reconstruction
Communications in U.S. History
U.S. Legal History
Publications
The Book of Morgan: A Story of
Power, Conspiracy, and Democracy in America. (Book in progress.)
Invisible Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to
Reconstruction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)
"Freedom of the Press in the Nineteenth Century: From Republicanism
to Mass Politics," in Freedom of the
Press: Constitutional Protections, "Fake News," and Where do we Go
From Here? (Virginia Law Foundation, 2017)
"Twelve Hungry Men: The Reform of Juries – and Jurors – in the Early
American Republic," article revised and resubmitted to the Law and History Review.
“The Political Economy of Opinion:
Public Credit and Concepts of Public Opinion in the Age of Federalism” TheJournal of the Early Republic 29:1 (Spring 2009), 35-62. Reprinted as “Arguments over Public Credit
Spawned New Ideas About Politics,” in Major
Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 3rd ed., Richard
Brown and Benjamin Carp, eds. (Cengage, 2013)
Review of Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen
Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution, in The Historian 79:4 (Winter 2017)
Review of Dubber, The Police Power:
Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government, in The Law and History Review 25:2 (2008)
"Killing King Caucus." Article for Johns Hopkins University
Press Blog. https://www.press.jhu.edu/news/blog/killing-king-caucus
"Newspapers and the Cant of Civility." Common-place 9.5
(2009). www.common-place.org/interim/reviews/schmeller.shtml.
Research Grants and Awards
Visiting Scholar, American Antiquarian Society, 2017
Frank and Helen Pellicone Faculty Scholar Award, Syracuse University,
2016
Charles Warren Center Fellow,
Harvard University, 2005-2006
National Endowment for the
Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers, July 2005
Research Fellow in the Program
in Early American Medicine, Science and Society, Library Company of
Philadelphia, 2001
Von Holst Prize Lectureship in
History, 1998
Mellon Fellowship in the
Humanities, 1991-1997
Jacob K. Javits Graduate
Fellowship, 1991 (awarded but declined)
Recent Guest Performances
"Popular Excitements and
the Paranoid Style: Anti-Masonry Reconsidered." Paper presented to the
Social Science Research Council on Media, Technology, and Democracy in
Historical Context. Brooklyn, NY, May 2019.
"The Book of Morgan."
Book proposal presented to Second Book Workshop, Conference of the Society for
Historians of the Early American Republic, July 2018.
"Murder, Conspiracy, and
Freemasonry in the Early Canal Era." Talk delivered to the Erie Canal
Museum, March 2018
"Freedom of the Press in
the Nineteenth Century: From Republicanism to Mass Politics." Talk
delivered to the Virginia Continuing Legal Education Seminar at Mount Vernon,
September 2017.
"The Book of Morgan:
Anti-Masonry, Public Opinion, and American Political Thought." Paper
presented to the Newberry Seminar on American Political Thought, Newberry
Library, December 2015
"The Civil War and 19th
Century Political Rhetoric." Talk delivered to the William Seward House
Lecture Series, August 2015
Panelist on "Lincoln, The
Constitution, and the Civil War," a symposium sponsored by the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the National Constitution Center, and the
American Library Association, held at Onondaga Community College, November 2014
"Putting the Founding
Fathers in their Place," Newberry Teacher's Consortium Seminar, Chicago,
IL, October 2014
"William Seward and John
Quincy Adams." Talk delivered to the William Seward House Lecture Series,
June 2014
“Filling the Box: Jury Selection
and the Politics of Jeffersonian Judicial Reform.” Paper presented to conference
on Jeffersonian Democracy From Theory to Practice, Princeton University, June
2012
“Twelve Hungry Men: The Reform of Juries – and
Jurors – in the Early Republic.” Paper presented to Ab Initio: Law in Early
America Conference, University of Pennsylvania, 2010
“Corn Pone Opinions:
Transatlantic Liberalism, Political Economy, and the Higher Journalism in the
Late Nineteenth Century” Paper presented to annual conference of the U.S.
Intellectual History Association, New York City, 2010
"Paper Pence and Public
Faith: Credit, Currency, and Political Economies of Opinion." Paper
presented to Symposium on Public Opinion, the Press, and Journalism in the
Eighteenth Century, University of Paris-Diderot, 2008.