Joshua Lynn

Josh previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed his Ph.D. He holds a BA in History and Political Science from Marshall University. Josh studies nineteenth-century politics, culture, and political thought in the United States, with particular attention to the interaction of race, gender, and conservatism in antebellum political culture.

He is currently revising a book manuscript on the racial and gender basis of the Democratic party’s political culture in the 1840s and 1850s. “Preserving the White Man’s Republic: The Democratic Party and the Transformation of American Conservatism, 1847-1860” argues that Democrats redefined American conservatism by placing it on a basis of liberal individualism and majoritarian democracy, as they looked to local majorities of white men to uphold racial and gender exclusion on the eve of the Civil War. The injection of grassroots democracy into conservative thought is a legacy that continues to animate American conservatism down to the modern New Right.

For more about Josh and his work visit his full biography at the Center for the Study of Representative Institutions at Yale.