| Post: | Head of Department |
| Other posts: | Professor of American History |
| Location: | Arts B B333 |
| Email: | R.Cook@sussex.ac.uk |
| Telephone numbers | |
| Internal: | 7279 |
| UK: | (01273) 877279 |
| International: | +44 1273 877279 |
Biography
After spending an action-packed gap year in the American midwest working in a paint store and riding the Greyhound, I managed to gain education at the universities of Warwick (BA) and Oxford (D.Phil). My doctorate was on the early Republican Party in Iowa which oddly failed to become a bestseller. I moved to Sussex in 2007 after teaching American history at Sheffield University for seventeen years. I am a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the Organization of American Historians and the British American Nineteenth Century Historians group, and a devoted supporter of Aston Villa (sometime European champions and still the best football team in Birmingham).
Role
Professor of American History in the Department of American Studies
Research
Although I think of myself primarily as a historian of the United States during the era of the Civil War, my research interests lie at the intersection of race, politics and society in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. I have published four books to date including popular texts on the the civil rights movement and what used to be called 'the Middle Period' of US history as well as a well-received study of the Civil War Centennial of the 1960s which was shortlisted for the 2008 Lincoln Prize. My current project is a biography of the powerful Republican politician, US Senator William Pitt Fessenden (1806-1869), who played a leading role in developing federal policy for the post-emancipation South during reconstruction. The book will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2009. Future research plans include a study of Charles Dickens's second trip to the United States and work on a collection of essays on southern secession to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press (the third volume in the Sussex lecure series organised by the Marcus Cunliffe Centre). I am involved in projects to digitize the reports of British consuls based in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century (a rich and largely untapped documentary source for political, social and economic historians) and to commemorate the Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War in 2011. I have also been known to dabble in the South African past and have a remarkable affinity for the history of Iowa.
Publications
Books
Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007)
Civil War America: Making a Nation 1848-1877 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2003)
Sweet Land of Liberty? The African-American Struggle for Civil Rights in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998)
Baptism of Fire: The Republican Party in Iowa, 1838-1878 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994)
Selected Articles and Essays
'Stiffening Abe: William Pitt Fessenden and the Role of the Broker Politician in the Civil War Congress,' American Nineteenth Century History 8 (2007), 145-67
'Unfinished Business: The African-American Response to the Civil War Centennial of 1961-65,' in Susan-Mary Grant and Peter J. Parish, eds., Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 48-64
'(Un)furl That Banner: The Response of White Southerners to the Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965,' Journal of Southern History 68 (2002), 879-912
'The Fight for Black Suffrage in the War of the Rebellion,' in Susan-Mary Grant and Brian Holden Reid, eds, The American Civil War: Explorations and Reconsiderations (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 217-38
'Awake the Beloved Country: A Comparative Perspective on the Visionary Leadership of Martin Luther King and Albert Lutuli,' South African Historical Journal 36 (1997), 113-35
'From Shiloh to Selma: The Impact of the Civil War Centennial on the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States, 1961-1965,' in Brian Ward and Tony Badger, eds, The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 131-46
' "The Grave of All My Comforts": William Pitt Fessenden as Secretary of the Treasury, 1864-1865,' Civil War History 41 (1995), 208-26
'The Political Culture of Antebellum Iowa: An Overview,' Annals of Iowa 52 (1993), 225-50. Reprinted in Marvin Bergman, ed., Iowa History Reader (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1996), 86-104 (reissued, Iowa City: Univeristy of Iowa Press, 2008).