Matt
Lassiter
Associate
Professor, History Department
Associate
Professor, Urban and
Regional Planning
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)
Curriculum Vitae
(pdf)
Contact Information
Publications (Books)
The
Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press, 2009), coedited
with Joseph
Crespino of Emory University.
Also view the Table
of Contents.
This anthology began as a conference: "The End
of Southern History? Integrating
the Modern South and the Nation", held March 23-24, 2006, at Emory
University in Atlanta.
**"End of
Southern History?" conference in the news: "The South
Returns to America," Atlanta Constitution (March 26, 2006)
The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in
the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006), available from the PUP
website and other sources. The
paperback version was released in August 2007. The above link includes purchasing information, a brief
description, blurbs, and the table of contents. The PUP website also includes the complete Introduction to The
Silent Majority.
Winner of the 2007 Lillian
Smith Book Award presented by the Southern Regional Council.
The Silent Majority—selected media features and book
reviews:
**"Interpreting
Some Overlooked Stories from the South," New York Times (May 1, 2007)
**Journal of American
History (Dec. 2006)
**"White
Blight," In These Times (Sept. 12, 2006)
**"Politics as Usual: How
the Republicans Came to Rule the South" Boston Review (May/June 2006)
**Review in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution (April 30, 2006)
**"The State of
Things," WUNC 91.5 FM (April 5, 2006)
**"St.
Louis on the Air," NPR-KWMU (Oct. 1, 2007)
**"Author
Uses City as Integration Model," Charlotte Observer (April 24, 2006)
I also discuss how I came to write The Silent
Majority in this History
News Network feature.
Video: "The
Silent Majority," Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia
(Nov. 17, 2006)
The Moderates'
Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (University
Press of Virginia, 1998), coedited with Andrew B. Lewis. I also co-wrote the
introductory essay to this volume and contributed a chapter on liberal
journalist Benjamin Muse and the strategies of white moderates to chart a
middle path in Virginia's response to the Brown
decision.
Current Book Project: The Suburban Crisis: The Pursuit and Defense of the
American Dream. I am working on a new book, loosely based on the
themes of my "History of American Suburbia" lecture course. I spent the summer of 2008 conducting research in Los
Angeles as a fellow at the Huntington
Library, and during the 2008-09 academic year I was a Visiting Research
Fellow at the Center for the
Humanities at Oregon State University.
The Suburban Crisis will offer a new synthesis of
post-1945 American suburban and metropolitan history through the examination of
four overlapping categories: popular culture, politics, planning, and public
policies. Also view the working Table of
Contents for this book project.
In the News: "History of American
Suburbia" and The Suburban Crisis:
**"The
Legacy of the Little Rock Nine," NPR Talk of the Nation (Sept. 25, 2007)
**"Popular
Culture's Evolving View of the Suburbs," NPR Weekend Edition (Oct. 7,
2006)
**"Beyond
the Picket Fence," Boston Globe (July 23, 2006)
**"Nation's
Suburbs Gain Respect in Academia," Detroit News (April 19, 2006)
**"Backstory:
Suburbia 101," Christian Science Monitor (Jan. 11, 2006)
**"Suburbia Redux,"
KUOW in Seattle (Feb. 27, 2006)
Other Publications
**"The
End of Southern History” (Introduction to The
Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, coauthored with Joseph Crespino)
**"De
Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth" (Chapter 1
of The
Myth of Southern Exceptionalism)
**"The
History of Racial Discrimination in Housing in the United States,
1866-1975," National Historic Landmarks Theme Study, National Parks
Service, United States Department of the Interior (forthcoming).
**"Big Government and Family Values: Political Culture in
the Metropolitan Sunbelt," in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics
of Place, Space, and Region in the American South and Southwest, ed.
Darren Dochuk and Michelle Nickerson (University of Pennsylvania Press,
forthcoming).
**"Searching for
Respect: From 'New South'
to 'World Class'
at the Crossroads of the Carolinas," in Globalizing
Charlotte: The Evolution of a Contemporary New South City, ed. Heather Anne
Smith and Bill Graves (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming).
**"Beyond the Red-Blue Divide," The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture, "Special Forum: The Sixties and the 2008 Presidential Election" (June 2009), 67-68.
**"The Bulldozer Revolution:
Suburbs and Southern History since World War II," Journal of Southern History (August
2009), 691-706 [coauthored with Kevin
M. Kruse].
**"Inventing
Family Values," in Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making
America Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2008).
**"Suburban
Strategies: The Volatile Center in Postwar Political Culture," in The
Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History
(Princeton University Press, 2003), edited by Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and
Julian E. Zelizer. Also read the Introduction to The
Democratic Experiment on-line.
**"The Suburban Origins of
'Color-Blind' Conservatism: Middle-Class Consciousness in the Charlotte Busing
Crisis," Journal of Urban History (May 2004), 549-582. This article is
extracted from The Silent Majority
and is available on-line through ProQuest and the JUH website and other academic search engines. It also has been republished by the Organization of American Historians in Joyce
Appleby, ed., The
Best American History Essays 2006 (Palgrave, 2006)
**"'Socioeconomic
Integration' in the Suburbs: From Reactionary Populism to Class Fairness in Metropolitan
Charlotte," a chapter in the volume The New
Suburban History (University of Chicago Press, 2006), edited by Kevin
M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue.
This collection includes proceedings from the conference CITY LIMITS:
New Perspectives in the History of American Suburbs (hosted by the Shelby
Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, Feb. 20-21,
2004).
**"The New Suburban History II:
Political Culture and Metropolitan Space," Journal of Planning History (Feb. 2005),
75-88. This article is a review
essay of six recent books in suburban and metropolitan history.
For the full list of publications and
conference presentations see my curriculum vitae
(pdf).
Current and recent
courses taught at the University of Michigan
Future courses: I will be teaching
History 467 in Winter 2010.
"Apathy,
Alienation, and Activism: American Culture and the Depoliticization of
Youth" (Lecture delivered on January 28, 2004, as a recipient of the
U-M Golden Apple Award)
For more teaching resources, see the American
Political Development Electronic Classroom operated by the Miller Center of
Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. I am the webpage editor for the Primary
Resources: Suburbia section of the Electronic Classroom, which also
includes a very useful Selection
of Syllabi in the broadly defined area of American Political Development.
I
am the organizer of the Metropolitan
History Workshop, along with Profs. Matthew
Countryman and Jesse
Hoffnung-Garskof. We have
received funding from the University of Michigan beginning in 2005 and
extending through the 2010-2011 academic year. For more information on past and future events sponsored by
this series, follow the link above. The Metropolitan History Workshop brings
scholars to campus for small book workshops or panels designed for graduate
students along with public lectures open to the campus community. It is in part an outgrowth of the Michigan
Colloquium on Race and Twentieth-Century American Political Development
that I co-organized along with Rob Mickey and Tony Chen during
2003-04.
Graduate Studies at the University of
Michigan
This is a list of the graduate students whom
I am advising or co-advising who have reached the candidacy stage, with links
to a brief synopsis of their dissertations-in-progress.
·
Aaron Cavin
(cavin@umich.edu), “Global Metropolis: Race and Immigration in San Jose and
Silicon Valley”
·
Joshua Coene
(jrcoene@umich.edu), “The Politics of Punishment in Pennsylvania and New South
Wales, 1970-2000.”
This
list includes former graduate students with whom I worked who have recently
completed dissertations at the University of Michigan.
I
also served as Director of Graduate Studies for the University of Michigan
Department of History during 2006-08.
For more information on graduate studies at the University of Michigan,
see the webpage for the History Graduate
Program.
Smart Growth and Regional Planning
For additional resources about suburban
sprawl, smart growth, and metropolitan planning in Ann Arbor, the state of
Michigan, and beyond, please visit my webpage on Smart Growth
and Regional Planning.