Jeffery R. Appelhans
Historian of Early America
I research and write on early American political and religious culture and develop transnational histories of the book in the Atlantic world.
Work
My central research concern is my book project, “The Creation of American Catholicism: From the Revolution to the Early Republic," which offers a new narrative: the untold story of how the Revolution and the early republic created American Catholics by unleashing the forces that established them as Americans. Across eight chapters, this book manuscript analyzes Catholics’ ability to develop political, ideological, and cultural credibility to secure prominence in the public sphere and civil society. And it reveals the role of larger cultural movements in rendering so many Americans so receptive to their efforts: at first the worldliness of educated cosmopolitanism, then toward the seductive charms of romanticism. “The Creation of American Catholicism” unveils a forgotten world for which there is no historiography, one that over the course of the seventy-one years between 1773 and 1844 flowered, flourished, and fell.This project has garnered national research and writing support, most notably and recently in the form of an NEH Fellowship (2021–2022).
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I am currently Early American Bibliographer at the American Philosophical Society, working on a second project I joined in 2019. I shortly became its principal architect and author. It is a massive public-facing digital bibliography and biography of the most generative works and authors in the Atlantic world—including reprints and editions in any language—from the early 1700s to 1865. This bold undertaking at the American Philosophical Society required my developing entirely novel methods of digital history, as described in my research statement. Thanks to funding from private donors and the NEH, this ambitious project aspires to become the new gold-standard: to expand and extend our understandings of print history, the history of science, and political and religious history across two centuries. [An early release version appears here.] (https://www.amphilsoc.org/members-bibliography-and-biography-project-1775-1785)
The Catholic Church of St. Mary, Philadelphia, ca. 1829, drawn on stone by W. L. Breton, Library Company of Philadelphia, https://www.librarycompany.org/
About
Jeffery R. Appelhans specializes in the political and religious culture of early America. He completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Delaware in 2018.Prior to pursuing the PhD, he spent a decade as a secondary Social Studies teacher, during which he was a James Madison Memorial Fellow.
