The University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street, Box 67
Chicago, IL 60637
phone: (773) 834-1271
fax: (773) 702-7550
Email: jts 
uchicago 
edu
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Modern United States political and social history; war and society; social science and the state; technology;
history and new media.
BIOGRAPHY
My research and teaching focus on the state and social citizenship in the modern U.S. I am especially interested in national political culture and its formation within specific social, cultural and institutional contexts. My current manuscript, “Americanism and Entitlement: Authorizing Big Government in an Age of Total War,” is a history of the social politics of the national state as its foundations shifted from welfare to warfare at mid-century. Its central concern is to examine the ways in which different groups of citizens encountered the burgeoning warfare state and in the process accepted, rejected or otherwise contested the legitimacy of expanding federal authority in everyday life.
My teaching commitments and interests include courses on the “new” political history; social movements; war and society; internationalizing domestic history; consumption; metropolitan America; the interwar period; the New Deal; World War II. In the future I plan to add courses on the rights revolution; the social politics of the cold war; the history of technology in American society; and the United States since WWII.
I have also done work in the emerging field of history and new media, developing a nascent methodology for using the web and other electronic media to generate “born digital” primary historical materials in a series of grant-funded projects which combine the qualitative and participatory approach of oral history and ethnomethodology with more conventionally archival aspirations to document and preserve primary materials.
SCHOLARSHIP
Americanism and Entitlement: Authorizing Big Government in an Age of Total War (book manuscript, in progress)
"'Buying Our Boys Back': The Mass Foundations of Fiscal Citizenship, 1942-1954,"Journal of Policy History, (Spring 2008).
"A Nation in Motion: Regional Reconfiguration and the Nationalization of American Political Culture, 1941-54," under revision for publication in The End of Southern History? Integrating the Modern South and the Nation, ed. by Joseph Crespino and Matthew Lassiter (under consideration, Oxford University Press).
“Hot War, Cold War: The Structures of Sociological Action, 1940-1955,” co-authored with Andrew Abbott, in Sociology in America: The American Sociological Association Centennial History, ed. by Craig Calhoun (University of Chicago Press, 2007).