• EARLY-AMERICAN HISTORY
• AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY
• HISTORY OF THE SOUTH
• 17TH-CENTURY ATLANTIC WORLD

Clemens (red shirt) on Grey's Peak, Colorado, Summer 2008

I am currently working on two projects. The first is a book on rural life in the late eighteenth-century Mid Atlantic. The work is based on a study of material culture and of the daily, seasonal, and market activity of farm families. The study focuses on Kent County, Maryland; Fairfield County, Pennsylvania, and Chester County, Pennsylvania. Some of my ideas were worked out in the essay I did with Lucy Simler, "Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1760-1820," in Steven Innes, ed., Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press & the Institute of Early American History & Culture, 1988), pp. 106-143; and, more recently, in the two essays on New Jersey rural life published in Land Use in Early New Jersey, with Peter O. Wacker (Newark, New Jersey Historical Society & Rutgers University Press, 1995)--my part of the work having to do with material culture and farm practices, not with land use.

The other project is a study of the Leopold-Loeb trial. I have been working with Kathy Jones and Janet Tighe to produce an edited version of the trial transcript and write an introduction that explores that legal, medical, and social significance of the trial. The project grew out of teaching I did with Warren Susman many years ago on famous trials and out of Gerry Grob's successful efforts to interest me in the legal problems associated with insanity.

Anyone interested in my published work might also consult:

The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

The Uses of Abundance: A History of New Jersey's Economy (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1993).

"A Revolution of Scale in the Overseas Trade: British Firms in the Chesapeake Trade, 1675-1775," with Jacob M. Price, Journal of Economic History, XLVII (March 1987), 1-43. Reprinted in Jacob M. Price, Tobacco in Atlantic Trade: The Chesapeake, London and Glasgow, 1675-1775 (Aldershot, Great Britain, 1996), III, 1-43.

William Paterson's "Address on the Dissolution of Nations," edited by Roberta L. Edwards (Flemington, N.J., Hunterdon County Historical Society, 1997).

TEACHING INTERESTS:

I regularly teach the survey course in American history, "The Development of the United States to 1865" (512:103); and occasionally teach the continuation of that course, "The Development of the United States, 1865 to the Present" (512:104). I also teach American constitutional history, generally as a two semester survey, at the 400-level, with a heavy emphasis on role playing (students, for example, reenact the constitutional convention of 1787) and moot court presentations of famous constitutional cases. In our undergraduate seminar program, I usually offer courses on the American Revolution and everyday life in colonial America. At the graduate level, I teach the introductory survey ("PDR I: America in the Age of European Expansion") covering the 16th and 17th centuries, with a heavy emphasis on intercultural relations and Atlantic peoples (but with a core still built around the British North American experience). Syllabi for some of these courses follow. I am also developing a web page of nineteenth-century (1790s-1820s) New Jersey appellate court cases.  The pages, when complete, will cover such subjects as divorce, marriage, water rights; slavery and manumission; murder, criminal responsibility, and insanity; and the like.  This is very much a "work in progress," but interested readers can see my  New Jersey Law Pages.

SERVICE:

I recently served as advisor to the Provost for the Humanities and chair of the search committee for a University Librarian. For the past ten years I edited the department alumni/alumnae newsletter (that is now mailed to about 270 former PhDs and to friends of the program) and for the last four years I worked as department graduate placement officer. I am currently the acting vice chair for graduate education in the department and an academic advisor for Rutgers College. Within the department, I work particularly with students interested in the five-year M.A. program in social studiues teaching (certification).
 

HOME ADDRESS:

81 Hillside Avenue Metuchen, N.J. 08840-1917

WORK ADDRESS:

Department of History Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey New Brunswick, N.J. 08901-1108 732-932-7941 or 732-932-6750; e-mail: clemens@rci.rutgers.edu

RECENTLY TAUGHT OR CURRENT UNDERGRADUATE COURSES (brief description):
 
 
 
 

RECENTLY TAUGHT OR CURRENT GRADUATE COURSES (brief description):
 

See also New Jersey Law Pages.  These cases will be used in Constitutional History and the History Seminar to introduce students to the way state courts dealt with problems of divorce, marriage, murder, water rights, annd other issues in the nineteenth century.  The pages are not yet complete, but the divorce law section provides a good sample of what will be available.

Updated: January 20, 2008