UMass Boston

Professor Chu’s research interests are in American colonial and legal history, and he teaches courses in those areas as well as the American Revolution.

PhD (History) University of Washington
MSL Yale Law School
MA (History) University of Hawaii
BA (American Studies) University of Pennsylvania

• Stumbling towards the Constitution: The Economic Consequences of Freedom in the Atlantic World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
• "Imagining a World without Tea or Sugar," in America on the World Stage: A Global Approach to U.S. History, eds. Gary Reichard and Ted Dickson (University of Illinois Press, 2008).
• With Ellen Parisi, Advanced Placement Resource Binder to Accompany America’s History, 7th ed. (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
• “George Frisbie Hoar and Chinese Exclusion: The Political Construction of Race,” in Faces of Community: Immigrant Massachusetts, 1840-2000, eds. Conrad Wright and Reed Ueda (Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003).
• "Debt and Taxes: Public Finance and Private Economic Behavior in Post-Revolutionary Massachusetts," in Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700-1850, eds. Conrad Wright and Kathyrn Viens, (Northeastern University Press, 1997).
• Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The Puritan Adjustment to Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (Greenwood Press, l985).
• "An American Story: Rose Quon Young Chu, Race and Gender in Twentieth-Century America" (The Docket 3.4, December 2020)

Professor Chu has written on a number of subjects ranging from the treatment of dissent in seventeenth-century Massachusetts to the Chinese Exclusion Act. He, with Maryann Brink, currently is working on a book-length project on separatist movements in the trans-Appalachian West during the Early American Republic. He has also published on the teaching of American history in K-12 settings. Additionally, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Filson Historical Society of Louisville, KY, and the Kentucky Historical Society. He serves as Editor of the New England Quarterly.

Outside the university, he has been actively involved in the teaching of American history in schools and various public history activities. A participant in numerous Teaching American History grants, he also has served as chair of the test development committees of the Advanced Placement U.S. History and College Level Equivalent examinations and as chief reader of the APUS history exam.

He has served as Trustee of the College Board and member of the governing Council of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and is a member of the Board of Trustees for Old North Foundation.