I am K-State’s economic historian. But I also consider myself a cultural historian — of the ways in which economic ideas work their way through society and are used and misused by politicians in the formation of public policy. Hence I have researched such diverse topics as the role that “natural monopoly” theory played in the rise of the regulation of the telephone industry in the nineteenth century (it’s more interesting than it sounds!), the development of the inheritance tax, and the history of income inequality across the industrialized nations. My book manuscript in progress examines the debates and policy outcomes surrounding the perceived economic and environmental consequences of the fantastic growth of the population in the twentieth-century United States (from 76 million to 290 million). Here at K-State I teach classes in American Political Development (a fancy term for political history), economic history, and more general classes in post-1945 U.S. history and (soon) America in the era of the Great Depression and World War Two. When I am not being an historian, I enjoy hiking, skiing, running, golf .... and the hopeless pursuit of the clutter-free life. I am also waiting for an MLB salary cap to save my Baltimore Orioles.

Select Publications

Manuscript in Progress: Are We Too Many? The Population Debate and Policymaking in the Twentieth-Century United States

"The Original Housing Crisis: Suburbanization, Segregation, and the State in Postwar America," Reviews in American History 36 (June 2008): 259-69

“Historical Income Inequality in Seven Nations: A Statistical Appendix,” in Social Contracts under Stress: The Middle Classes of the United States, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century, ed. Olivier Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari (New York: Russell Sage, 2002).

“Igniting Memory: Commemoration of the 1942 Bombing of Southern Oregon, 1962–1998,” The Public Historian 21 (Spring 1999): 65–83.

Courses

Undergraduate:
The Economic History of Modern America
The U.S. Since 1945
The “Survey” (The U.S. Since 1877)
The Advanced Seminar in History (HIST 586)
America in Depression and War (U.S. 1929-1945)

Graduate:
The Twentieth-Century United States
The Eisenhower Seminar
American Political Development