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; the American Revolution

Academic Profile

Professor Rogers’s research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Constitution, American legal history, and the American Revolution. His most recent books are: Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts, The Boston Strangler, and Boston: City on a Hill (with Lisa J. Rogers). An article on “State Constitutionalism and the Death Penalty,” will be published in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Policy History. Rogers also has published articles in the New England Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the American Journal of Legal History, among other scholarly journals. The undergraduate and graduate courses he teaches parallel his research interests: “U. S. Constitutional History, I & II,” “The Bill of Rights,” “Anglo-American Law,” (with Professor Robin Fleming), and "Atlantic World,” a history core course. Rogers is the chair of the Seminar in Early American History, hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a member of the Adams Papers Executive Publication Committee. His current book project is titled “Faith, Healing, and the First Amendment.”

Representative Publications

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

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

  • 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)