History Department

Alan Rogers

professor

rogers alan

Telephone: (617) 552-3782

Office Location: 21 Campanella Way, 424

Email: alan.rogers@bc.edu

Curriculum Vitae: please click here 

Education

PhD, University of California-Santa Barbara, 1968


Fields of Interest

United States Constitutional and legal history


Academic Profile

Professor Rogers’ s research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Constitution and American legal history. His most recent book and a cluster of scholarly articles focused on the death penalty in Massachusetts. He is currently working on two projects: the contested intersection of faith healing and the First Amendment; and a history of the anti-vaccination movement from 1721 to 2009, for which he was awarded a New England Regional Consortium Fellowship. The undergraduate and graduate courses Rogers teaches parallel his research interests: “U.S. Constitutional History, I and II; “The U.S. Bill of Rights,” “The Death Penalty: USA and EU,” and “Church and State,” (with Professor James O’Toole).  Rogers is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.


Representative Publications

  • Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008)

  • "State Constitutionalism and the Death Penalty," Journal of Policy History (2008)

  • "The Death Penalty and Reversible Error in Massachusetts," Pierce Law Review (2008)

  • Boston: City on a Hill (American Historical Press, 2007)

  • The Boston Strangler (Commonwealth Editions, 2006)

  • Murder on Trial (SUNY Press, 2005) [with Robert Asher, Lawrence Goodheart]

  • Alan Rogers and Edward W. Hanson, "Thieves, Rogues, and Judges in Early Republican Massachusetts," Massachusetts Legal History (2003)

  • "'A long train of hideous consequences': Boston, Capital Punishment and the Transformation of Republicanism, 1780-1805," in James O'Toole and David Quigley, eds., Boston's Histories (2003)

  • "'Success -- At Long Last': The Abolition of the Death Penalty in Massachusetts, 1928-1984," Boston College Third World Law Journal (2002)

  • "Finish the fight: The Struggle for Women's Jury Service in Massachusetts," Massachusetts Historical Review (2000)

  • "'An anchor to the windward': The Right of the Accused to an Impartial Jury in Massachusetts Capital Cases," Suffolk University Law Review (1999)

  • "Chinese and the Campaign to Abolish Capital Punishment in Massachusetts, 1870-1914," Journal of American Ethnic History (1999)

  • Discovering the Public Interest: A History of the Boston Bar Association (co-author with Douglas Jones, 1993)