Daniel Galvin

Presidential Party Building in the United States

Daniel Galvin, Yale University
Mentor: Sidney Milkis, University of Virginia

Daniel Galvin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. His primary areas of research are the American presidency, political parties, and American political development. His forthcoming book, Presidential Party Building in the United States (Princeton University Press), demonstrates through detailed archival research that Republican presidents since Dwight Eisenhower have persistently and purposefully worked to build their party into a stronger and more durable political organization with enhanced operational capacities. Democratic presidents, in contrast, eschewed the work of party building, leaving their successors to start from scratch and making cumulative organizational development in their party more difficult. This partisan variation in modern presidential behavior challenges a long tradition of scholarship, which assumes that all presidents act in fundamentally the same ways and that both parties exhibit essentially symmetrical structures and run parallel operations. The aim of this book is to bring presidential party building into view as a variable component of modern American political development whose significance is clearly evident in politics today.

Galvin’s dissertation examined the actions undertaken by presidents to change their parties, and finds that at best only half the story is in view. The aim of his dissertation was to demonstrate the fact that some modern presidents have acted more constructively with regard to their parties than others, to consider why this might be so, and to bring presidential party building into view as a component of modern American political development whose significance and variability is clearly evident in politics today.

Shamira Gelbman

Coalitions of the Unwilling: Insurgency and Enfranchisement in the United States and South Africa

Shamira Gelbman, University of Virginia
Mentor: Elisabeth Clemens, University of Chicago

Shamira Gelbman is an Assistant Professor of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. Her research is on race, social movements, and democratization in the United States and South Africa. Gelbman received her MA from the University of Virginia and her BA from Hunter College, CUNY. At Virginia, Gelbman taught both American politics and Spanish courses.

Based on a paired comparison of the American civil rights movement and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, Gelbman’s dissertation argued that state actors' responses to social movements vary with changing coalition dynamics at both the elite and mass levels. Specifically, the confluence of intra-regime conflict and labor-civil rights coalitions provides the incentives for democratic concessions that would otherwise be too politically risky for public officials who are beholden to constituencies that oppose suffrage expansion to undertake.

Caroline Lee

Compromising Natures: Moral Economies of Environmental Decision Making

Caroline Lee, University of California at San Diego
Mentor: Marc Landy, Boston College

Caroline Lee is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Lafayette College, and is a member of the American Studies faculty. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego in 2006. Her previous work has been published in the Journal of Urban Affairs.

Lee’s dissertation explored obstacles to civic engagement in local environmental politics. Lee compared a spectrum of conservation decision-making bodies in three different U.S. communities to find that the devolved public deliberation formats heralded by researchers over the last ten years have in fact encouraged Balkanization and allegations of exclusion. On the other hand, informal partnerships between national environmental organizations and local elites have brokered unlikely alliances that involve reluctant stakeholders in habitat restoration, even in politically conservative communities. These public-private partnerships, which Lee called "conservation machines," increase participation by minimizing contention with local growth networks and generating manifold opportunities for public input. Lee hypothesizes that the national environmental interest groups that critics malign as out of touch with the grassroots have played important backstage roles encouraging power sharing on the ground in select communities. She argues that these outcomes suggest that political theorists should reconsider the idealization of deliberation and the presumed sources of civic alienation.

Heather Lewis

Scaling Down: Half a Century of Community Control in New York City's Schools, 1945-95

Heather Lewis, New York University
Mentor: Martha Biondi, Northwestern University

The community control movement in education was part of a multi-pronged movement targeting housing, employment, healthcare, policing and welfare in many of New York City's African-American, Puerto Rican, and Asian communities of the late 1960s. While the movement for community control of schools paralleled and intersected with organizing in other fields, it had a distinct trajectory and a unique set of outcomes because of the role public education is supposed to play in producing the conditions for citizen participation in democratic governance.

Spanning a half-century in New York City's school system, 1945–95, Lewis interpreted the historical trajectory of multiple efforts to scale-up educational reform by scaling-down governance and bureaucracy. Her dissertation's major claim is that improvement was possible because educators and school board members in these decentralized districts were driven by a similar moral commitment to societal and school change as were the community control activists in the 1960s. Given the limitations of the school system's decentralized structure, a downturn in the local and national economy, and the continued resistance of the teachers' and principals' unions to community control, local district leaders' accomplishments in the '70s and '80s were significant. Lewis’ dissertation posited that while the continuity of leadership and improvement in educational outcomes in these districts may not have been representative of the thirty-two community school districts created under decentralization, the districts' broader social and political contexts were not atypical. Rather than treating the two districts as idiosyncratic, her dissertation argued that other New York City community school districts with similar student populations and committed leadership could have followed a different course if there had been more effective support from the central school system, teachers' and principals' unions, elected officials and the public.

Stephanie Muravchik

New Creatures in Christ: American Faith in an Age of Psychology

Stephanie Muravchik, University of Virginia
Mentor: Gary Laderman, Emory University

Stepanie Muravchik contributed to the article “Christian Citizens: the Promise and Limits of Deliberation” in Critical Review: a Journal of Politics and Society in 2007.

After World War II, though they did not realize it, Christians began a successful project of redeeming millions of alienated Americans by fortifying pastoral care, fellowships, and evangelism with secular ideas and techniques adapted from psychology. They thereby shepherded millions of the nation's most disaffected citizens—especially the homeless, addicts, the sick, and the dying—into faith's fold. Muravchik’s dissertation traced their efforts and its effects in three contexts: the psychiatric training of ministers, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and The Salvation Army rehabilitation centers. She ultimately argued that the model of selfhood developed in these settings, by merging individual happiness and self-determination with transcendent and communal relationships, could support an American democratic culture in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Suleiman Osman

The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Post industrialization and Race in South Brooklyn from 1950 to 1980

Suleiman Osman, Harvard University
Mentor: Tom Sugrue, University of Pennsylvannia

Sulieman Osman began teaching in the Department American Studies at George Washington University in 2006. His primary interests are in U.S. urban history, the built environment, U.S. cultural and social history, and the study of race and ethnicity. He is currently teaching courses on race and ethnicity in the American metropolis, an introduction to American Studies, and a graduate research seminar in American urban history. Osman received his PhD in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University.

Whether referred to as "gentrification," "urban revitalization," "embourgoisement," or "back-to-the-city movement," the influx of white collar professionals into low-income central city areas has been an important demographic trend which challenges a unidirectional narrative of postwar central city decline. While most historians have focused solely on the outward flows of white flight and suburbanization, white middle-class "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) from 1950-1980 poured enthusiastically into postwar South Brooklyn. Gentrification was not just a demographic trend, but an important political movement as well. By describing gentrification, Osman’s dissertation added a spatial context to postwar political history. The New Left, the counterculture, and the student movement all emerged on an "urban frontier" – an imagined middle landscape between the institutional space of the central business district and the untamed "wilderness" of the urban ghetto. Although both liberal and pro-urban, the new middle class often came into conflict with poorer residents. Osman’s dissertation described the race and class tensions in gentrifying neighborhoods throughout the postwar period, exploring an aspect of postwar race relations previously overlooked by historians.

Julia Ott

When Wall Street Met Main Street: the Quest for an Investors’ Democracy and the Emergence of the American Retail Investor, 1900-1930

Julia Ott, Yale University
Mentor: Meg Jacobs, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Julia Ott is an Assistant Professor of History at Eugene Lang College and New School for Social Research. Her interests include 20th century American history, financial and business history, political conservatism, consumer culture, and women's and gender history. She received her PhD in History from Yale University in 2006, and M.A. and an M. Phil. from Yale in 2002, and a B.A. in History from Princeton University in 1997.

Given the depths of populist and progressive hostility towards Wall Street in the decades before the First World War, few could have predicted that the nation's stock and bond markets would emerge as icons of a New Era of permanent prosperity, even before the late 1920s stock market boom. Roughly thirty million Americans acquired federal war bonds, while the number of corporate shareholders likely increased fivefold in the 1920s. Ott’s dissertation explained these transformations in political attitude and social practice by relating an intertwined history of investors and investorism. By analyzing the marketing of stocks and bonds by the federal government, corporations, and the financial industry, as well as new investorist theories of political economy formulated by a range of economic thinkers, her study revealed the early twentieth century origins of the idea of an ownership society in American political culture. Without the ideological validation considered in this dissertation, the United States would have never developed its first broad, national, impersonal market for financial securities in the 1920s.

Stephen Porter

Defining Public Responsibility in a Global Age: Refugee Resettlement in the U.S., 1933 to 1980

Stephen Porter, University of Chicago
Mentor: Akira Iriye, Harvard University (Professor Emeritus)

Stephen Porter is currently a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Chicago. In the summer of 2007, he was awarded a fellowship to participate in the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Porter’s dissertation examined the governing strategies employed for the massive task of "integrating" two million political refugees into communities across the country. The "resettlement network" that emerged to implement the refugee resettlement policies of this period boasted a vibrant mixture of public and private institutions operating both within and outside of the United States. Porter argued that the "hybrid" nature of this resettlement network was born of practical necessities, but served important ideological imperatives during the Cold War for the new American superpower intent on proving to domestic and international audiences that its brand of liberal democratic capitalism would help even the world's most destitute people prosper. According to Porter, resettlement policies thus served as a highly conspicuous testing ground for postwar techniques of social governance that sought to reconcile the exponential growth of American state capacities and aims of government with enduring suspicions of "big government" and an emerging faith in private sector models for public policies.