Peter Thompson is a historian of the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolutions. He is currently completing a biography of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his secretary William Short for OUP Press. He has published extensively in journals, including the William and Mary Quarterly and Journal of the Early Republic. He prides himself on the breadth of his interests, having published on seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century topics, set in the American mainland and the West Indies, and peer reviewed for Modern Philology. His first book was a cultural history of taverngoing in Philadelphia, Rum Punch and Revolution. He welcomes innovative research proposals in political, cultural and intellectual history.
Selected Publications
Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1999).
Cassell’s Dictionary of American History (London: Cassell, 2002). [updated and revised edition, sole author]
'Judicious Neology: The imperative of paternalism in Thomas Jefferson's Linguistic Studies', Early American Studies. An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1 (2003), 187-224.
'William Bullock's "Strange Adventure": A Plan to Transform Seventeenth-Century Virginia', William and Mary Quarterly, LXI (2004), 107-128.
'The Thief, the Householder, and the Commons: Languages of Class in Seventeenth-Century Virginia', William and Mary Quarterly LXIII (2006), 253-80.
'Inventive Localism in the Seventeenth Century', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., LXIV (2007), 525-48.
'Henry Drax's Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-Century Barbadian Sugar Plantation', William and Mary Quarterly LXVI (2009), 565-604.
State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States, co-edited with Peter Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).
'David Walker's Nationalism—and Thomas Jefferson's', Journal of the Early Republic, 37/1 (Spring 2017), 47-80.
