Michael O'Brien

Historian

  • Born: April 13, 1948
  • Birthplace: Plymouth, England
  • Died: May 6, 2015
  • Place of death: Cambridge, England

Contribution: Michael O’Brien was a prize-winning British historian, best known for exploring the intellectual culture of the American South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Background

Michael O’Brien was born on April 13, 1948, in Plymouth, England. He attended Trinity Hall in Cambridge, England, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. He was a research student at Trinity Hall and received his undergraduate degree there in the early 1970s. Later, O’Brien received his PhD from the University of Cambridge.

For twenty-five years, O’Brien taught history at numerous American universities, including the University of Michigan, the University of Arkansas, and Miami University. He returned to Cambridge in 2002 and became a lecturer at Jesus College, also a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. O’Brien was a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Career

O’Brien devoted much of his scholarly research to the intellectual culture of the American South, including its politics, literature, and history. He explored how the historical experience of the South has come to inform the identity of its people.

O’Brien published and edited many works concerned with American history. Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (1988) features a collection of essays that helped establish O’Brien as a leading historical scholar. Rethinking the South was hailed by critics for its incorporation of social history, literary criticism, and historiography in the effort to position the South within the greater European and American intellectual culture.

O’Brien published a two-volume work, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–60, in 2004. The books examine the lives and works of Southern intellectuals, including their ideas on race, class, gender, and ethnicity. In them, O’Brien analyzes historical patterns of travel and migration in the South and their impact on the region’s intellectual development. In the second volume, O’Brien discusses the literary genres that became popular in southern intellectual circles, as well as southern political and intellectual culture.

O’Brien received several awards for the work, including the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University and the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association. Conjectures of Order was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2005. The two volumes were abridged and published as one book in 2010. In light of its success, O’Brien was promoted to professor of American intellectual history at Cambridge.

In addition to his work on the American South, O’Brien did considerable research on the Adams family of Quincy, Massachusetts. The Adamses are best known as the progenitors of two American presidents: John Adams and John Quincy Adams. O’Brien published Henry Adams and the Southern Question, about author and political commentator Henry Adams, in 2005.

In 2010, O’Brien published Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon. The book reconstructs the journey of Louise Catherine Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, as she traveled from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Paris, France, in 1815. Adams’s journey took place during a tumultuous period in Europe, as it recovered from the Napoleonic Wars. Mrs. Adams in Winter was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Biography and Autobiography.

O’Brien’s other works included An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827–67 (1993), Henry Adams and the Southern Question (2005), and Placing the South (2007). He later edited The Letters of C. Vann Woodward (2013), the collected correspondence of American historian C. Vann Woodward. Along with Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, he also coedited The Worlds of American Intellectual History (2016).

As a teacher at Cambridge, O’Brien supervised research students on a myriad of subjects relating to the American South, including Southern intellectuals, Unionism in antebellum South Carolina, and American science in the late nineteenth century. He taught courses on American history between 1789 and 1865. He also contributed to other lectures when American intellectual life was part of the discussion.

O'Brien developed cancer and died at home on May 6, 2015, at the age of sixty-seven.

Impact

Through his research, lectures, and award-winning publications, O’Brien established himself as a leading authority on the history of intellectual culture in the American South. His work shed new light on the region’s historiography and helped place it in a more global historical perspective.

Personal Life

O’Brien lived in Cambridge, where he worked as a researcher, lecturer, and teacher. In 1969 he married his wife, Tricia Bacon, who survived him.

Principal Works

The Idea of the American South, 1920–1941, 1979

Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History, 1988

Conjectures of the Order: Intellectual Life and The American South, 1810–60, 2004

Placing the South, 2007

Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon, 2010

Bibliography

Isaac, Joel, and Samuel James. “Michael O’Brien Obituary.” The Guardian, 14 May 2015, www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/14/michael-obrien. Accessed 29 Jan. 2020. ‌

“O’Brien, Professor Michael.” British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences. British Academy, n.d. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.

“Professor Michael O’Brien.” Faculty of History. University of Cambridge, 2013. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.

Stansell, Christine. “Mrs. Adams’ Big Adventure.” Rev. of Mrs. Adams in Winter. Slate. Slate Group, 31 Mar. 2010. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.