Alan Taylor (historian)
Alan Shaw Taylor (born 1955 Portland, Maine) is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian specializing in early American history. He is the author of a number of books about Colonial America, the American Revolution, and the Early American Republic.
Life
Taylor graduated from Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, in 1977 and earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1986. His thesis advisor was Marvin Meyers, a historian of Jacksonian America,[1] whom Taylor praised in the preface of his book Writing Early American History (2005).[2] Currently he is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, having taught previously at Boston University.
Taylor is best known for his contributions to microhistory, best exemplified in his Pulitzer-Prize winning history of William Cooper and the settlement of Cooperstown, New York. Using court records, land records, letters, and diaries, Taylor painstakingly reconstructs the economic, political and social history of New England and the settlement of New York. Taylor is also part of a generation of historians committed to the revival of narrative history, rejecting the method-driven, quantitative work of the previous generation of "new social historians" and the theory-laden work of more recent "new cultural historians." In addition to writing books for a wide public readership, Taylor is a regular contributor of book reviews and essays to The New Republic.
Taylor's current research includes a borderlands history of Canada and the United States in the aftermath of the American Revolution. His book The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies was published by Alfred A. Knopf in October 2010.[3]
Taylor is a devoted Boston Red Sox fan, and is known for always wearing historically themed neckties.
Awards
- 1996 Bancroft Prize, for William Cooper's Town
- 1996 Beveridge Award, for William Cooper's Town
- 1996 Pulitzer Prize for American History
Works
- Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: the Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier 1760-1820, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1990.
- William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995
- American Colonies, New York: Viking/Penguin, 2001.
- Writing Early American History, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
- The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
- The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
References
External links
- The Pulitzer Guy, Colby College Colby Magazine, Winter 2002
- History Department profile at the University of California, Davis
- Lecture on The Civil War of 1812 at the Pritzker Military Library