Born in North Carolina and raised and educated in the West, I have been fortunate to study and work in many different parts of the country. I teach and write about twentieth-century U.S. history, and my interests range widely over urban history, the history of American politics and political culture, and transformations in American in the long post-World War II era. My first book, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003), won four professional prizes, including the James A. Rawley prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH). My second book, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (Hill and Wang, 2012), is about gender, sexuality, and political culture in the U.S. from the 1960s to the 2000s. With Margot Canaday and Nancy Cotty I co-edited, and wrote the introduction to, Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern U.S. History (University of Chicago Press, 2021) about the modern history of the American state's power in, and over, people's intimate lives. I am currently working a book tentatively entitled Driven: The Rise and Fall of the Hydrocarbon Middle Class, about houses, cars, and children in the making of the modern middle-class family and the modern energy regime. I am also the co-author (with Rebecca Edwards and Eric Hinderaker) of a college-level textbook, America's History, published by Bedford/St. Martin's.
