A historian of early America, Dr. Matthew Warner Osborn’s most recent book is Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture (University of Chicago Press, scheduled for publication September 2026). Using fragmentary historical evidence, Night Hawk reconstructs the never-before-told two-hundred-year-old story of an outlandish superhero who took flight over Philadelphia between 1828 and 1830. This strange bird was a radical champion of the oppressed, the voice of searing anger and resentment expressed in the first socialist labor journal published in the United States. The Night Hawk was a prominent figure in the founding of the American labor movement and emerged as a harbinger of the twentieth-century superheroes that dominate the global culture industry today.
Dr. Osborn’s first book, Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2014), examines the rise of pathological drinking as a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and lurid fascination in 19th century America. It argues that medical responses to the disease delirium tremens shaped modern conceptions of alcohol abuse and drug addiction.
Dr. Osborn teaches a range of undergraduate courses on colonial America, the American Revolution, and the early American republic, as well as introductory courses in the history of medicine, and 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)