Though my teaching interests range across the last four centuries of American history and extend beyond the United States to include global patterns of imperialism, my research has focused my attention primarily on American life in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Thus, most of my courses will concentrate on those periods of U.S. history. Below (in white text) I group the courses I teach into four broad categories (surveys, women's history, cultural history, and theory) and describe the topics, themes and methods of inquiry those kinds of courses comprise.
is the history of broad social change and those popular movements organized to effect changes in work, politics or culture. Rather than focusing merely on leaders, laws, elections, wars, discrete events or elite individuals' lives, it tends to focus on changes in labor patterns and work, the changing nature of urban spaces and population migrations, changes in daily life and domestic relationships, broad political patterns, social crises and upheavals. Because of their focus on ordinary people's lives and efforts and their interest in social conflict and resolution, social historians often focus their attention on groups who are at the center of significant social conflict and political struggle and those who are either economically, politically or culturally marginalized, such as African-Americans, laborers, immigrants, colonized populations, and women. To answer such large questions, social historians, most often rely on empirical data drawn from official documents like the census and records of institutions like hospitals, courts, municipal authorities or schools. Social historians also utilize qualitative data drawn from private writings like letters and diaries or public texts like sermons, guidebooks, and newspaper accounts to better understand society as a whole.
is a relatively new field of historical scholarship. It combines the methods and perspectives of literary historians (who closely interrogate the form as well as the content of published or private writings to find out about people's ideas and beliefs), film, tv and video theorists (who assess the impact and meaning of visual texts on audiences), and historians of material culture (who consider the meaning and significance of objects and technology). Cultural historians seek not only to explain changes in the way people think, feel, and relate to one another but also to explain persistent patterns of social conflict. Cultural historians are closely related to social historians in that they want to understand broad social patterns, conflict and change, but they differ in the kinds of questions they ask and in their treatment of sources. Cultural historians often focus a lot of attention on very specific texts, rather than large amounts of data. Or, in fact, they treat all data as texts whose meanings are not self-evident, but need to be "read." They tend to bring all of their energy to bear on exploring the complexities, contradictions and potential meanings embedded in the relationship between texts and audiences.
can focus on a variety of issues and use a multitude of different kinds of texts, but it primarily concerns itself with the relations between the nation-state and foreign nations or peoples. These relationships are not only political (involving leaders of state and negotiations over things like borders) but also military (thus an emphasis on armed conflict), economic (involving both mutual trade and coerced exploitation of resources and people), and cultural (attitudes and social relationships which shape diplomatic relations). While social, economic, political and cultural institutions and relations in part determine diplomatic relations and foreign policies, diplomatic relationships also affect domestic culture and policies. The work of diplomatic historians help us to understand the degree to which national life and culture is intertwined with global processes and relationships.