Jason Opal

Area of Specialization: Colonial, revolutionary and 19th century American history

Jason Opal studies the American Revolution and early United States (1780s-1830s) and is interested in social, intellectual, and political history. His first book, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (University of Pennsylvania, 2008), examined the transformation of ambition from personal sin to national virtue within a post-Revolutionary but pre-industrial countryside. In this way, the book sought to draw together the historiographies of republican ideology, democratization, and the emergence of capitalism in the decades around 1800. In addition to a critical anthology of the work of English-American radical Thomas Paine, to be published by W.W. Norton, he is working on a new book entitled Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson and the Ordeal of American Democracy. This project explains how a violent ethic of retaliation, bred along the southern borderlands of eastern North America, became the basis of a new populist ideology in the early American republic. Part of the book concerns the nature of international law in early American culture and politics, and will be published as a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution. Jason has published articles in The Journal of American History, The History of Education Quarterly, and Reviews in American History. His 2004 essay, "Exciting Emulation: Academies and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1780s-1820s," won the Binkley-Stephenson award for best article of the year from the Organization of American Historians. At McGill, he teaches courses on early American foreign relations, the American Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the history of the American family.