Michael O'Brien (historian)

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Michael O'Brien (born April 13, 1948 in Plymouth , Devon , † May 6, 2015 ) was a British historian . His research focus was on the intellectual culture of the American southern states .

Life

Youth, studies and academic teaching

Michael O'Brien was born in Plymouth, Devon in 1948, the youngest of five children of John O'Brien, a Glasgow innkeeper and former sailor, and his wife Lilian, who was from Cornwall . He spent his childhood in Glasgow, Anglesey , London and finally South West England . There he attended the Devonport High School for Boys in Plymouth. He then attended Trinity Hall , a college at the University of Cambridge , and was tutored there by Jonathan Steinberg . In 1968, Steinberg made it possible for O'Brien's first visit to the United States, a summer job at a carpentry shop in Alabama . In 1969 O'Brien graduated. He married shortly after that in the summer of the same year and moved with his wife to Nashville , Tennessee , where he pursued his postgraduate studies . In 1976 he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. He then worked at various universities in the United States for the next 25 years. Namely at the University of Michigan , the University of Arkansas and most recently from 1987 to 2001 at Miami University , where he taught as a professor of history. From 2001 he taught at the University of Cambridge, first as a lecturer , then as a reader . In 2005 he was appointed Professor of American Intellectual History . In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy .

His book Conjectures Of Order won the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University , the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association , the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians , the C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature and the American Studies Network Book Prize . It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History . His book Mrs Adams in Winter was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography .

O'Brien died in May 2015 at the age of 67 years at a cancer .

Historical research

O'Brien's research focus, triggered by his first stay in the United States in 1968, was on the history of the southern states of the 19th and 20th centuries and their intellectual culture. When he began his research in the early 1970s, the notion of the southern states as anti-modern, anti-intellectual, provincial, and inherited from slavery was still widely held. In his first book, The Idea of ​​the American South, 1920-1941 , he looked at how this idea, the concept of the “southern states” itself came about.

O'Brien has shown in his nearly 40-year academic career that this notion was incorrect and that the southern states had a diverse intellectual, cosmopolitan tradition. After numerous publications, this culminated in his 2004 two-volume work Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 .

Publications (selection)

  • The Idea of ​​the American South, 1920-1941 (1979)
  • (Ed.): All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse In The Old South (1982)
  • A Character Of Hugh Legare (1985)
  • with David Moltke Hansen (Ed.): Intellectual Life In Antebellum Charleston (1986)
  • Rethinking The South: Essays In Intellectual History (1988)
  • (Ed.): An Evening When Alone: ​​Four Journals Of Single Women In The South, 1827-67 (1993)
  • Conjectures Of Order: Intellectual Life and The American South, 1810-60 (2004, 2 volumes)
  • Henry Adams and the Southern Question (2005)
  • Placing the South (2007)
  • Mrs Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon (2010)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME O'Brien, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 13, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Plymouth , Devon
DATE OF DEATH May 6, 2015