History

Education

• PhD, Washington University
• MA, Washington University
• MA, University of Chicago
• BA, Knox College

Interests and Expertise

Professor McCurdy specializes in colonial and Revolutionary America, gender and LGBTQ history, and the Atlantic world.

His research examines the connections between social and political history in eighteenth-century North America. In Citizen Bachelors, he considers how ideas about marital status in the colonial era gave rise to American citizenship, while in Quarters, he explores how debates over military power shaped notions of place in Revolutionary America.

Courses

• HIST 115: What is an American?
• HIST 123: The United States to 1877
• HIST 380: American Colonies
• HIST 415: Sexual Communities in American History
• HIST 462/562: The Atlantic World
• HIST 480: The American Revolution
• HIST 490W: Senior Seminar
• HIST 505: Historical Methods
• HIST 538: Studies in Colonial American History

Publications and Presentations

• Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2019).
• Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009).
• “Gender and Violence in Colonial America,” in Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume III: The Early Modern World, ed. Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, and Caroline Dodds Pennock, 255-273 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• "From Fort George to the Fields: The Public Space and Military Geography of Revolutionary New York City," Journal of Urban History 44 (2018): 625-42.
• "Citizen-Soldiers in the Revolutionary Era and New Republic," in The Routledge Handbook of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military, ed. Kara Dixon Vuic, 24-40 (New York: Routledge, 2018).
• “Gentlemen and Soldiers: Competing Visions of Manhood in Early Jamestown,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster, 9-30 (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
• “‘Your Affectionate Brother’: Complementary Manhoods in the Letters of John and Timothy Pickering,” Early American Studies 4 (2006): 512-45.
• “Laws Targeting Bachelors in Colonial America,” A Voice for Men: Humanist Counter-Theory (12 December 2014).
• “Marbury v. Madison (1803),” The Lynn Rivers Show, WEMU 89.1 (6 February 2012).
• "We the Bachelors," The New York Times (4 July 2009).

Professional

Associations/Memberships

• Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
• McNeil Center for Early American Studies
• Organization of American Historians