Research and Teaching Interests:
Urban History, The Study of Places and their Uses, Music and Society, Labor History, Cultural History, and Southern History Personal Statement:
My career as a writer and teacher has taken me to a lot of different places. I started out studying the history of workers and their ideas about politics and unions in the New South. After that, I wrote about fiction and history, masculinity and Progressive reform, the body and the state, legislative apportionment, and music – Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie’s – and society. More recently, I have begun to focus on race and class and the creation and destruction of urban spaces. My most recent book on Atlantic City, New Jersey explores these issues; issues I will return to in my current project, a study of Starbucks, the making (and distribution of) coffee house culture, and the molding of public culture in the United States and across the globe in the 21st century.
Representative Publications:
Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (Oxford University Press, 2004).
‘Jumping Jim Crow’: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights, co-edited with Jane Dailey and Glenda Gilmore, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
“Segregated Fantasies: Race, Public Space, and the Life and Death of the Movie Business in Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1945-2000,”Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, ed., (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 64-87, 320-25.
“The Personal and the Historian,” Reviews in American History (September 2003), 479-83.
“Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: African American Strategies for Day-to-Day Existence/Resistance in the Early Twentieth-Century Rural South,” with Peter Coclanis, African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 189-09.
"New York Avenue: The Life and Death of Gay Spaces in Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1930-1990," Journal of Urban History (March 2002), 300-27. ABC-CLIO Award Winner and Urban History Association Award Winner.
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