Research

Mark Peterson received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1993, where he taught for several years before coming to Iowa in 1998. His first book, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England, was published in 1997 by Stanford University Press. Since then, he has been developing an expansive project on the history of Boston as a participant in the Atlantic community from roughly 1630 to 1860. This project combines a number of different interests and perspectives, including the relationship between religion and commerce, the politics of empire, and the use of material culture approaches, in an effort to extract Boston's history from traditional narratives of the nation-state and explore the possibilities and limitations of Atlantic history. Specific subjects that thread their way through this project include money, books, and rum, piracy, slavery, and missionaries, welfare, warfare, and silverware. Contacts and conflicts between Bostonians and the peoples of Europe, West Africa, the Americas, and the Atlantic islands shape the dimensions of the narrative.

In the process of assembling this work, Mark has published a number of articles, including "Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver," William and Mary Quarterly (2001) which won the Woodrow Wilson Prize from the Presbyterian Historical Society; "The Selling of Joseph: Bostonians, Anti-Slavery, and the Protestant International," Massachusetts Historical Review (2002); and two articles forthcoming in anthologies in 2003. He has been named a Faculty Scholar for 2002-2005 by the University of Iowa, and has received a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to do research at the American Antiquarian Society for the 2003-04 academic year.

In addition, Professor Peterson serves on the editorial board of Commonplace.org, an on-line journal of early American life, and is editing a volume of the Winthrop Papers for the Massachusetts Historical Society.