INTRODUCTION
I taught history at Eastern Illinois University 1989-2021, where I was also Director of the Faculty Development and Innovation Center 2016-2021 (and helped begin the Center for Student Innovation), and am now Distinguished Professor Emeritus. I have published on feasting, plotting, gossiping, preaching, politicking, printing, and historical thinking in the early modern period, particularly England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland (links to more recent works provided). I have co-authored a best-selling text on Early Modern England (3rd ed, 2020), and co-edited an accompanying sourcebook (2nd ed, 2009). Current projects are on late-Stuart plotting, sermonizing, and scandal, and the roots of modern detectives.
Check out my students' award-winning work. Past syllabi are available online (most enhanced). I continue to follow the exciting current and future work of EIU's FDIC and the CSI in Booth Library.
Publications
- "The Paper Feast in Late-Stuart London: Feast Tickets, Advertisements, Songs, Sermons, and Entertainments." Huntington Library Quarterly. (special issue, March 2022)
- "Constructing Conspiracy: Reporting the Rye House Plot Trials." In The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart and Early Hanoverian England, eds. Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby, 135-157. London: Boydell & Brewer, 2021.
- "Mrs. Bedamore through the Keyhole: Privacy, Local Knowledge, and Things Unpublished in Late-Stuart England." Midland History 46, 1 (Jan. 2021): 50-64.
- Dagni Bredesen and Newton Key. "Thinking with Murder: How the Victorians and Edwardians created and used the 1857 Waterloo Bridge Mystery." Victorians Institute Journal. (special issue, "Victorian and Edwardian Mysteries") 47 (2020): 155-177.
- Robert Bucholz and Newton Key. Early Modern England, 1485-1714: A Narrative History, 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 2009, 2020.
- Mark Hoffman, Jean-Phillipe Cointet, Philip Brandt, Newton Key, and Peter Bearman. "The (Protestant) Bible, the (Printed) Sermon, and the Word(s): The Semantic Structure of the Conformist and Dissenting Bible, 1660-1780." Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts 68 (June 2018): 89-103. (American Sociological Association Section on Sociology of Religion's Distinguished Article Award, 2018)
- "The 'Boast of Antiquity': Pulpit Politics Across the Atlantic Archipelago during the Revolution of 1688." Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 83, 3 (Sept. 2014): 618-49.
- "Crowdsourcing the Early Modern Blogosphere." In historyblogosphere: Bloggen in den Geschichtswissenschaften, ed. Peter Haber and Eva Pfanzelter. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2013. [earlier open source peer review version Oct.-Dec. 2012]
- Newton Key and Robert Bucholz, eds. Sources and Debates in English History, 1485-1714, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 2009 (now revising for 3rd ed.).
- “‘High feeding and Smart drinking’: Associating Hedge-Lane Lords in Exclusion Crisis London.” In Exclusion and Revolution: the worlds of Roger Morrice, 1675-1700, ed. Jason McElligott, 154-73. Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2006.
- Newton E. Key and Joseph P. Ward. "Metropolitan Puritans and the Varieties of Godly Reform in Monmouth." Welsh History Review 22, 4 (Dec. 2005): 646-72 (Version awarded the Nichols Prize for Local History of England and Wales, Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester, March 2005).
- "Samuel Annesley," "William Assheton," "John Birch," "Sir Job Charlton," "Paul Foley," "Richard Gardiner," "Francis Gregory," "Sir William Gregory," "John Lightfoot," "Adam Littleton." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Newton E. Key and Joseph P. Ward."`Divided into Parties': Exclusion Crisis Origins in Monmouth." English Historical Review 115, 464 (2000): 1159-83.
- Newton E. Key, ed., "Localités/Localities," a special issue of Research and Review 7 (2000). Also, author of "Introduction: Localités and Nationalism as the Vestigial and the Incipient?," 1-7, and "Localités and Early Modern Britain," 71-8, and co-author, with Mark Voss-Hubbard, "A Chronicle of the Coles County Region," 89-100.
- "The Localism of the County Feast in Late-Stuart Political Culture." Huntington Library Quarterly 58, 2 (1996): 211-37.
- "The Political Culture and Political Rhetoric of County Feasts and Feast Sermons, 1654-1714." Journal of British Studies 33, 3 (July 1994): 223-56.
- "Comprehension and the breakdown of consensus in Restoration Herefordshire." In The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, edited by Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie, 191-215. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.