Leslie Butler
Professor
Appointments
Professor of History
Vice Chair, Department of History
Area of Expertise
19th-century American history,
American thought and culture,
Victorian America
Biography
Leslie Butler is an American intellectual and cultural historian, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century. She is the author of two books:
Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 2023), which was awarded the Annual Book Prize from the Society of U.S. Intellectual History and short-listed for the Edwards Book Award, Rodel Institute.
and Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
She joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 2003 and since then she has also taught at University College, London and Occidental College, where she was the 2020-21 Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor. Her other scholarship includes articles and contributions to the Cambridge History of America and the World and the Oxford Illustrated History of the United States. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and Massachusetts Historical Society.
Education
B.A. University of Rochester
M.Phil. Yale University
Ph.D. Yale University
Taught Courses
Publications
Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
"Ideas in American History," Nicholas Guyatt, ed., Oxford Illustrated History of the United States of America (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2024).
"The Liberal North Atlantic," The Cambridge History of America and the World: Volume 2, 1812-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
"The 'Woman Question' in the Age of Democracy: From Movement History to Problem History," in Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, eds., The Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
"A 'Badge of Advanced Liberalism': The Place of Woman Suffrage in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Political Thought," in Andrew Preston and Doug Rossinow, eds., America's World: The Transnational Circuitry of U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
"Lincoln as the Great Educator: Opinion and Educative Liberalism in the Civil War Era," in Don Doyle, Marcus Gräser, and Jörg Nagler, eds., The Transnational Significance of the American Civil War (Palgrave Macmillan; 2016).
"'Encountering the Smashing Projectile': William James on John Stuart Mill and the Woman Question," in Martin Halliwell and Joel Rasmussen, editors, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
"From the History of Ideas to Ideas in History," Modern Intellectual History 9.1 (2012), 157-169.
"Victorianism," in Joan Shelley Rubin and Scott E. Casper, eds., Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
David Armitage, Thomas Bender, Leslie Butler, Don H. Doyle, Susan-Mary Grant, Charles S. Maier, Jörg Nagler, Paul Quigley, and Jay Sexton, "Nationalism and Internationalism during the Civil War Era: An Interchange," Journal of American History 98.2 (2011), 455-489
"Historicizing American Travel, at Home and Abroad," Modern Intellectual History (April 2011), 1-15.
"Reconstructions in Intellectual and Cultural Life," in Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, Thomas J. Brown, ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
"Liberal Victorians and Foreign Policy in the Age of Empire," in The Problem of Evil: Race, Slavery, and the Ambiguities of Reform, S. Mintz and J. Stauffer (eds.) (2006).
"Investigating the 'Great American Mystery': Theory and Style in Henry Adams' Political Reform Moment," in Henry Adams and the Need to Know, W. Decker (ed.), (2005) 80-103.
Works in Progress
Travel Writers and the Social Scientific Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (book-length project)
Contact