Welcome

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) has earned a general reputation as the early republic’s most ambitious and accomplished literary figure.  He wrote prolifically in many genres, founded and edited three major magazines, published widely read political pamphlets, and intervened in many debates about the culture and politics of the new nation.

The Charles Brockden Brown Society was founded in 2000 as an international scholarly  organization to stimulate interest in the life and writings of Charles Brockden Brown (1770-1810) as well as other writers from this period and to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and information among Brown scholars and other interested persons.

Program – 2023 Conference, University of Nottingham, England

Crime, Justice, and Cultures of Transgression in Early America
September 14-17, 2023
A conference sponsored by the Charles Brockden Brown Society

Our conference site in Nottingham calls to mind both the outlaw figures associated with the legend of Robin Hood and the haunted villains associated with the poetry of Lord Byron. Increasingly popular in North American culture across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such transgressive characters spoke to a society undergoing major changes in its understanding of the legitimacy of rebellion and the demands of obedience to authority. Shifts in perceptions of acceptable dissent, the legitimacy of legal and penal institutions, and the relationship between criminality and racial, gender, and class status during the Revolutionary era have had deep and abiding consequences for American thought and culture that still resonate with twenty-first century struggles to address these issues. 

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On July 19, 2023, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Charles Brockden  Brown Society dedicated an official state marker commemorating Brown in Philadelphia. It is located by the U.S Custom House on Chestnut Street.

Marker detail