Department of History

Michael Vorenberg specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, with a particular focus on the
topics of the Civil War, emancipation, law, and the U.S. Constitution. He received his PhD at
Harvard University and was then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center.
After teaching as an assistant professor of history at the University of Buffalo, he started his
career at Brown in 1999. He is the author, most recently, of Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to
End the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025). He also published Final Freedom: The
Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which was a finalist for the
Lincoln Prize and was used as the basis for the screenplay of Stephen Spielberg’s 2012
film, Lincoln. His writings have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, Politico,
and the Washington Post. He is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American
Historians, and he serves on the Board of Editors of the Journal of American Constitutional
History. From 2004 to 2007, he was a member of Brown University's Steering Committee on
Slavery and Justice.