Robert A. Gross
Robert Gross signed onto the movement for a “new social history” in the early 1970s and has been teaching and writing social and cultural history ever since. Focusing on early America in the 18th and 19th centuries, with particular interest in New England, he is the author of two books on Concord, Massachusetts: The Minutemen and Their World (1976), which won the Bancroft Prize in 1977 and has been reissued in a 25th anniversary edition (2001) and in a revised and expanded edition in 2022, and The Transcendentalists and Their World (2021), which received the Peter J. Gomes Award from the Massachusetts Historical Society for the best work of nonfiction on Massachusetts history and was designated one of the top ten books of 2021 by the Wall Street Journal. He is also the editor of In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (1993). Gross was an early recruit to the field of book history, co-editing An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (2011), volume 2 in the American Antiquarian Society’s History of the Book in America. Active in professional societies and in public history, he contributes articles and reviews to a wide range of scholarly and general periodicals. He taught successively at Amherst College (1976-88), the College of William and Mary (1988-2002), and the University of Connecticut (2022-14), with visiting appointments at Brown and Brandeis University, Mount Holyoke and Smith College, the University of Sussex, and the University of Southern Denmark (Fulbright Chair).
Particular Areas of Study: Lexington and Concord, both the battles and the communities; the Provincial Congress and mobilization against royal government; social and political history of Massachusetts towns; slavery and emancipation in the Bay Colony and state; Shays’s Rebellion; broader history of the American Revolution
Publications:
Editor, In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion, 1993