Mark Peterson

Professor of History 

Mark Peterson is a specialist in the History of early North America and the Atlantic world. He authored the forthcoming book The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865. He is also the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England. Currently, he is at work on two new books. One of them, The Long Crisis of the Constitution, offers a historical account of the U.S. Constitution as a political compromise based on eighteenth-century conceptions of power and property, and describes how the slow erosion of its original premises in the face of a changing U.S. population and economy have left the nation politically unmoored. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2007 through 2018, and at the University of Iowa from 1998 through 2007. Peterson earned his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University.