Amy S. Greenberg

I am a historian of antebellum America (1800-1860) with a particular interest in the politics, culture, and social history of the decades before the Civil War. My research has been chronologically focused (why stray from the most fascinating period in American history?) but topically broad. I have written books on urban society and culture (Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City), and on the role that the ideology of manifest destiny played in both foreign affairs and American society and culture at home (Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire). I have also written a general  history of the territorial expansion of the United States (Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents). I tend to focus on the transformation of gender roles in most of my work, from volunteer firefighting in 1820s Baltimore to reactions to William Walker's Nicaraguan filibustering adventures in the mid-1850s, but have been increasingly interested in the reciprocal relationship of the United States with the larger world. In the fall of 2012 Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage Books will publish my newest book, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 Invasion of Mexico, a narrative history of the U.S.-Mexican War focused on opposition to the war and the creation of America's first national antiwar movement.  I am currently researching and writing a history of U.S. attitudes towards imperialism, focused on ordinary Americans. I love to lead class discussions on primary sources, and try to integrate visual images into all my lectures. In 1999 Penn State awarded me the George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2009 I was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.

Recent Publications:

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, (Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage
Books, fall 2012). Main selection: History Book of the Month Club. selection: Book of the Month Club, Military Book of the Month Club.

Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents. The Bedford
Series in History and Culture (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2012)

Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton
University Press, 1998)

Awards and Service:

Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2009)
American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship (2009-2010)
Top Young Historian Profile, History News Network (2005)
Gilder Lehrman Fellowship, New York Historical Society (2005)

Recent Courses:

HIST442 - The Early American Republic
HIST444 - The United States in Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
HIST467 - Latin America and the United States
HIST545 - Topics in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America, 1877-1919