Rodney Hessinger
Professor
Background
Rodney Hessinger is an early American historian. His courses focus on the social and cultural dimensions of the American past, exploring fields as diverse as Native American history, evangelical religion, the family and childhood, gender and sexuality, and the colonial Caribbean,
Areas of Expertise
- The history of gender and sexuality
- religion
- and the family in the early American republic.
Research Interests
Recently I completed a study of conflicting notions of manhood at play in memories of the Battle of Lake Erie (1813). I am beginning a larger project on how notions of masculinity informed efforts to reform sailors in the early nineteenth century.
Education
Ph.D., Temple UniversityB.A., Ursinus College
Courses Taught
Spiritual Awakenings in Early AmericaNatives and Missionaries in North America
History of the Caribbean
The Age of Sail: Commerce and Conflict on the High Seas
History of Sexuality in America
The History of the Body and Science in America
American Sin: Campaigns Against the Flesh in the US Past
The History of Childhood in America
Publications
“Kaleidoscope of Courtship in the Nineteenth Century,” in Cambridge History of Sexuality (in press; Cambridge University Press).
Smitten: Sex, Gender, and the Contest for Souls in the Second Great Awakening (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022).
““A Base and Unmanly Conspiracy”: Catholicism and the Hogan Schism in the Gendered Religious Marketplace of Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 357-396.
Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle Class America, 1780-1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
