Professor of History
Expertise: Political and cultural history of the United States since 1865, The American West and Midwest, Rural America, The Great Depression and New Deal, Rural politics, Militarization and the Cold War West
Achievements:
- Member of the Organization of American Historians
- Member of the American Studies Association
- Member of the Western History Association
- Member of the Midwestern History Association
- Published books: The Liberal Heartland: The Political History of the Postwar American Midwest (forthcoming, University of Kansas Press, 2025); Nuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); The Conservative Heartland: The Political History of the Postwar American Midwest (co-editor, University of Kansas Press, 2020); Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (2nd edition, Cornell University Press, 2017); Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains (University of North Carolina Press, 1992)
- Selected articles and book chapters: “Is the Rally Really Worth it? The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and the Costs of Neo-liberalism” (Origins, 2022); “When an Old Assignment Becomes New Again: Teaching Benedict Anderson in the Age of #Black Lives Matter” (Teaching American Studies, 2021); “Making War Their Business: The Short History of Populist Anti-militarism” (Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2014); Numerous chapters on rural American history, the Cold War, and the Midwest.
