Joanne B. Freeman (born April 27, 1962) is a U.S. historian and tenured Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Freeman has published two books as well as articles and op-eds in newspapers including The New York Times,[1][2] magazines such as The Atlantic and Slate. In 2005 she was rated one of the "Top Young Historians" in the U.S.[3][4]
Early life and education
Freeman was born in Queens, New York City, in 1962. She graduated from Pomona College in 1984 and received both her MA (1993) and PhD (1998) in American History from University of Virginia; her doctoral advisor was Peter S. Onuf, a major scholar on U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. Prior to graduate school, Freeman was a public historian, delivering lectures at a range of US history-centric institutions including the Smithsonian, South Street Seaport, Museum of American Finance and the Library of Congress over a span of seven years. Her area of expertise is political culture of early America, particularly the revolutionary and early national eras. [citation needed]
Career
In addition to editing Alexander Hamilton: Writings for the Library of America in 2001, Freeman is the author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (2001). Her first book, Affairs of Honor, received praise for being "analytically incisive" from Stanford University historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Rakove and "enormously original" from Rutgers University history Professor and Thomas Jefferson scholar Jan Lewis.[5] In this debut work, Freeman lays out the challenges that early patriots faced as they struggled to create a new and independent country. Freeman posits that office-holders and office-seekers were particularly immersed in conflict: "Regional distrust, personal animosity, accusation, suspicion, implication, and denouncement—this was the tenor of national politics from the outset.” [6]
A prominent focus of her research has been the practice of dueling, including those rules governing one of the most famous encounters in history between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. In an interview with fellow historians Kenneth T. Jackson and Valerie Paley, Hamilton author Ron Chernow called attention to Freeman's work and her discovery that Hamilton had been involved in ten previous character challenges prior to the eleventh and fatal event.[7]
Freeman's series of lectures on the American Revolution is one of 42 courses offered online by Open Yale Courses.
Freeman's published findings about the history of dueling helped inspire the song "Ten Duel Commandments" in the Tony Award winning 2015 musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda.[12] Though she agrees with fellow historians that the show has historical errors, she is a fan of the Broadway hit and its creator and believes it is engendering interest in the Founding Fathers.[13] Freeman has also appeared in the 2017 PBS documentary Hamilton's America that traced the making of the musical.[14][15]
Recent Work
Freeman worked for two years as a historical consultant for the National Park Service in the reconstruction of the Hamilton Grange National Memorial.[16][17] In 2017, she edited and published The Essential Hamilton: Letters & Other Writings, with the Library of America. Her latest book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, documents and analyzes episodes of physical violence between antagonistic members of U.S. Congress in the decades before the Civil War; it was published September 11, 2018, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Starting February 3, 2017, Freeman joined the crew of the popular weekly American History radio show BackStory as a co-host; the show based out of University of Virginia was also a popular podcast. The premise of the one hour program was to examine contemporary happenings through the lens of the past.[18]BackStory wrapped production in July 2020.[19]
Freeman co-hosted the podcast Now & Then with fellow historian Heather Cox Richardson, from 2021 through the end of the show's production in October 2023.[20] Episodes can still be heard on Spotify.
Joanne B Freeman; Johann N Neem, Jeffersonians in power : the rhetoric of opposition meets the realities of governing, Charlottesville ; London University of Virginia Press 2019. ISBN9780813943053
The Election of 1800: A Study in the Logic of Political Change,Yale Law Journal, June 1999
Dueling as Politics: Reinterpreting the Burr-Hamilton Duel,The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 53 (April 1996): 289–318.
Slander, Poison, Whispers, and Fame: Jefferson and Political Combat in the Early Republic,Journal of the Early Republic, Spring 1995
History as Told by the Devil Incarnate: Gore Vidal's Burr, in Novel History: History According to the Novelists, ed. Mark Carnes (Simon & Schuster, 2001)
The Art and Address of Ministerial Management: Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Congress, in Neither Separate Nor Equal: Congress and the Executive Branch in the 1790s, ed. Kenneth Bowling (Ohio University Press, 2000)
Explaining the Unexplainable: Reinterpreting the Sedition Act, in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Julian Zelizer, Meg Jacobs, and William Novak (Princeton University Press, 2003)
Corruption and Compromise in the Election of 1800: A Study in the Logic of Political Change, in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, ed. Peter S. Onuf and Jan Lewis (University Press of Virginia, September 2002).
"'Can We Get Back to Politics, Please?': Hamilton's Missing Politics in 'Hamilton'." In Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds., Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America's Past. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.
