About Campaign Trails

Nearly a century ago, the historian Carl Becker urged his colleagues to make sure their work on the past made itself known in the present. “The history that lies inert in unread books,” he warned, “does no work in the world.”

I’m a professor of American history, and this is my attempt to let my scholarship do some work in the world. I specialize in the political and social history of twentieth-century America, and I’ll use this venue to draw out and discuss the fascinating connections between that past and our present.

The various campaigns waged by powerful politicians and ordinary Americans in grassroots social movements alike didn’t simply reshape their world, long ago. They shaped ours as well. “If you want to understand today,” Pearl Buck noted, “you have to search yesterday.”