Class of 2009 College Alumnus Publishes New Book
July 19, 2010
Georgetown alumnus Patrick Brown (C’09) plans to be the top expert in the industrial development of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Brown recently published a book, Industrial Pioneers: Scranton, Pennsylvania and the Transformation of America, 1840-1902, which is based on research he began at Georgetown during his senior honors seminar. Brown credits history professors Tommaso Astarita, Joseph McCartin, and Howard Spendelow with helping him develop his ideas into a publishable form.
“As I was trying to determine a topic for my thesis, I began researching Scranton, PA, which is both my father’s hometown and the city in which I was born,” explained the history major. “I discovered that Scranton was the Silicon Valley of the nineteenth century, and that its population had grown from 100 in 1840 to 100,000 in 1900. While there were excellent primary and secondary sources looking at specific facets of the city’s growth, no historian treated the city’s rise as a unified narrative with a focus on how this development had affected the way people thought about themselves and the world around them. I decided that there was enough room in academia for me to become a world expert on Scranton, Pennsylvania between 1840 and 1902.”
Brown has had a particularly busy year. On top of completing a book, he has been working with Teach for America (TFA). He currently teaches U.S. government, economics, psychology, and sociology at Greenville Weston High School in Greenville, Mississippi. “I decided to apply for Teach for America somewhat impulsively—I went on the organization’s website, and saw that they needed teachers in the Mississippi Delta,” explained Brown. “I had never actually heard of the Delta, but I decided to apply, prioritized the region, and was admitted on the first deadline. TFA is challenging, especially in the first few months, but I love my students and have found the experience extremely rewarding.”
Every successive year at Georgetown increased Brown's focus on scholarly research. From his first semester at Georgetown to his last, he was inspired by professors to push himself and think critically. “During my freshman year, I was privileged to participate in the College Liberal Arts Seminar. On one of the first days of class, [Theology professor] Father McFadden told us, ‘What I want to do is to present the ultimate context for all human thinking.’ My Georgetown education forced me to internalize this context—the idea that the way people think about themselves and the world around them always draws on the past. More than anything else I learned in college, this understanding shaped my research, and, more fundamentally, the way I view the world.”
-Gabrielle Matthews
