Matt
Lassiter
Associate
Professor, History Department
Associate
Professor, Urban and
Regional Planning
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)
Contact Information
Publications
The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt
South (Princeton
University Press, 2006), available in hardcover from the PUP website and other
sources. The paperback version is
scheduled for 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)
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. 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)
Conference:
"The
End of Southern History?
Integrating the Modern South and the Nation". I recently co-organized (with Joseph Crespino of
Emory University) a theme conference on moving beyond the framework of southern
exceptionalism and exploring new directions in post-1945 southern and American
history. The conference was held
March 23-24, 2006, at Emory University in Atlanta. The conference included twelve presentations (described in
the above link) that are designed to produce an edited collection, tentatively
titled The End of Southern History.
**"End
of Southern History?" conference in the news: "The South
Returns to America," Atlanta Constitution (March 26, 2006)
Other
Publications
"De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National
Myth" (forthcoming, The End of Southern History)
"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).
"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.
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 with my
colleague Andrew Lewis, 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.
For
the full list of publications and conference presentations see my curriculum vitae.
Current and recent
courses taught at the University of Michigan
Future
courses: I will be on leave during the 2008-09 academic year. Tentative plans include teaching History
364 in Fall 2009 and 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.
This list includes former
graduate students with whom I worked who have recently completed dissertations
at the University of Michigan.
I also am serving 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.