A historian of early America, Dr. Matthew Warner Osborn is the author of two books. Night Hawk: America’s First Superhero (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) tells the forgotten story of a superhero who flew over the streets of Philadelphia between 1828 and 1830. Night Hawk illuminates the early American roots of the far more famous twentieth-century figures like Superman and Batman, and describes how this obscure character, and his author, had an outsized influence on the development of nineteenth-century culture, especially with regards to newspaper writing, popular crime fiction, commercial theater, and the American labor movement.
Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2014) describes how the medical responses to the disease delirium tremens shaped modern conceptions of alcohol and drug addiction. This research will be featured in an upcoming documentary about the founding of Alcoholics’ Anonymous being produced by Altimeter Films.
Matthew teaches a range of undergraduate courses on colonial America, the American Revolution, and the early American republic, as well as introductory courses in alcohol and drug studies. His graduate colloquiums focus on the recent historiography of early America and the Atlantic World.
Courses
Undergraduate:
Graduate:
Academic Credentials
B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz (1989)
M.A./Ph.D. University of California, Davis (2007)