Selected Recent Essays
The Airbrushed Revolution BBC World Histories December/January 2017-2018
“Divisive Figures” BBC World Histories, October/November, 2017
“Generation Games” BBC World Histories, August/September 2017
“An ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’ Case?” BBC World Histories, June/July 2017
“History’s Cold Comfort”, BBC World Histories, April/May 2017
“The Post-Truth Past”, BBC World Histories, February/March 2017
“Why we must learn to understand zig-zags”, BBC World Histories, December/January 2016-2017
“Why Did America Elect Donald Trump?” BBC History Magazine, November 2016
Review of Alan Taylor, American Revolutions, BBC World Histories, December 2016/January 2017
“Donald Trump’s Unsurprising Victory”, BBC History Extra, November 2016
“A Brief History of Election ‘Rigging’ in the United States, BBC History Extra, October, 2016
“The Battle for the US Constitution”, BBC History Extra, May 2016
“Rise of the Robber Barons”, BBC History Magazine, November 2016
“With a smile on his face”, Times Literary Supplement, July 10, 2015
Academic Articles
“The Challenge of Biography: What do they know of Lincoln who only Lincoln know?” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association (2010)
“The Global Lincoln“, Journal of American History (2009)
“Lincoln Scholarship and the Return to Intimacy”Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association (2006)
“Beyond the Realignment Synthesis: The 1860 Election Reconsidered” in Gareth Davies & Julian E. Zelizer, eds, America at the Ballot Box. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, 59-74
“The Politics of Theatrical Reform in Victorian America“, American Nineteenth Century History (2012)
“The Cult of Abraham Lincoln and the Strange Survival of Liberal England in the Era of the World Wars” Twentieth Century British History (2010)
“‘On the Altar of the Nation’: Heroic Sacrifice and the American Civil War” in Sibylle Scheipers, ed., Heroism and the Changing Character of War: Toward Post-Heroic Warfare? New York: Palgrave, 2014. 33-47
“The Fortunate Banner: Languages of Democracy in the United States, c1848,” in Joanna Innes and Mark Philp, eds, Re-Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750-1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 28-39
“Conservatism, Transformation and the War for the Union,” in Iwan W. Morgan and Philip John Davies, eds, Reconfiguring the Union: Civil War Transformations. New York: Palgrave, 2013. 41-58
“Victorian Radicalism and the Idea of America: Reynolds’s Newspaper, 1850-1900,” in Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey, eds, The American Experiement and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776-1914. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. 135-146
“Land of opportunity?” in Nicola Miller, Axel Körner and Adam I. P. Smith, eds, America Imagined: Explaining the United States in Europe and Latin America, 1850-1900. New York: Palgrave, 2012.
“’The Stuff Our Dreams Are Made Of’: Abraham Lincoln in the English Political Imagination,” in Richard J. Carwardine and Jay Sexton, eds, The Global Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011: 123-138.
Adam Smith: Historian 