Adam Rowe is a historian of the United States with a particular interest in national political culture from the Revolution to the late nineteenth century. His dissertation, “The Paradox of Union: The Civil War and the Transformation of American Democracy,” considers how Republican leaders and intellectuals gradually embraced a new theory of their political system as they scrambled to save it during the Civil War. At a broader thematic level, Adam’s research has focused on the interface between intellectual and political history, tracing the unique combination of traditions, institutions, and beliefs, rooted in the colonial and European past, that ruptured abruptly in the crisis that ushered in the modern United States.

When he isn’t reading and writing history, Adam is usually apologizing to his wife and three young children for spending too much time reading and writing history.