The writing of a biography of a 20th-century American architect known for his public buildings: government centers, museums, religious centers, educational research complexes, and memorial parks.

My project will be the first full-length biography of the architect Louis Kahn, and the only book about him to be aimed at a wide general audience. Architecture is a pertinent subject for all of us --we live amidst it, whether we wish to or not-- and if the twentieth century produced a "public" American architect, Louis Kahn was it. He did not design shopping centers or fancy hotels or expensive condominium towers or corporate skyscrapers. Instead, he focused on medical and educational research complexes, government centers, art museums, libraries, memorial parks, religious buildings,and other structures that would serve the public good. At the same time, the private side of his life was so complex, so obscure, and sometimes so unconventional that it has been largely unexplored in any of the works written about him. Yet even with these personal complications, Kahn remains an exemplary figure in architecture.

A book-length study of the archaeology and history of ancient Megiddo in northern Israel, the site referred to as Armageddon in the Book of Revelation.

Few people today realize that Armageddon is a real place, but it certainly is. It is the ancient site of Megiddo in northern Israel, where the remains of 20 cities lie buried one on top of another within a 70-foot-tall mound. James Michener's book "The Source," published to worldwide acclaim in 1965, featured the fictitious site of Makor, which was a compilation of the archaeological sites of Megiddo and Hazor. "Digging up Armageddon" turns fiction into fact, for it is the real story of Megiddo, told in a way that has never been done before. Written as narrative non-fiction in an unprecedented contribution to the humanities by the current co-director of the Megiddo Expedition, "Digging up Armageddon" is a compelling reconstruction of Megiddo's archaeology and history down through the ages, including both the excavations and the excavators, set within the larger context of the development of western civilization from the Neolithic Revolution through the end of classical antiquity.

A history of hunting as a sport in America, with its deep influence on culture and society since the 19th century.

My book is a social and cultural history of sport hunting, an American passion that was immediately popular when it was introduced to the public in the mid-19th century and which continues to affect our cultural and political landscape. Promoted as a means of reconnecting an increasingly urban America with nature, sports magazines invoked the elitism of the British hunt, the independence of the American frontiersman, and the stealth of the Native American. Even clerics sermonized on the sport’s behalf, as it was said to restore spiritual health and manliness. Gun-making, clothing, and tourism industries sprang up around the pastime. Hunting’s long history has deeply influenced our American experience, including begetting the conservation movement. However, due to the sport’s abandonment by elites, as well as our changing values regarding diet, animal ethics, the use of firearms, and what constitutes recreation, it has largely been neglected as a topic of historical inquiry in America

A book and accompanying website on all aspects, including history, design, financing, and construction, of America's tallest building.

One World Trade Center: The Biography of the Building responds to the public’s great curiosity about how the new skyscraper that anchors the World Trade Center, unlike any in memory, was built. The book explores the super tower’s planning, aesthetic premise, and historical origins. It examines the tower’s groundbreaking safety measures, its structural and construction challenges, and the politics of commemoration and financing. Extensive first-person accounts of those responsible—from ironworkers to architects to financiers—reveal their motivations and struggles. Lavishly illustrated with photographs and plans, the book also includes explanatory diagrams, maps, and critical timelines. An interactive website complements and expands upon the publication, allowing the public to track the WTC’s progress and access in-depth interviews and film clips. Above all, this is a profoundly human story about the heroic efforts and dogged determination that raised the tallest building in the nation.

A biography of a klansman (the author's great-great grandfather) in the American South during Reconstruction, exploring the roots of American racial violence and ideology.

I propose in a fellowship year to work on the biography of a klansman, tracing the life of a foot soldier in the race battles that occurred during Reconstruction in the American South. The vigilante in this project was an ordinary man, a French-speaking carpenter by the name of Constant LeCorgne, who was my great-great-grandfather. LeCorgne joined and fought with the White League, a militia in Louisiana equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan. A person long dead, his life thinly documented, LeCorgne was a person who despite a marginal place in memory once ranked as a hero to his white contemporaries. The biography will follow the evolution of this white guerilla soldier as a way to explore the roots of American racial violence and ideology. Segregation and white supremacy disfigured American life for 150 years—this project zeroes in on one man to investigate how, why, and by whom they were shaped.

A biographical examination of the life, times, and celebrity of the poet and his role in shaping American cultural identity.

A multi-layered biographical and critical narrative written for the general reader examining the life, times, and unprecedented celebrity of the 19th-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and of his role in the shaping of a cultural identity that was truly American. A project ripe in the 21st century for a fresh consideration, the book will also profile at length the influence of Longfellow's ill-fated wife, Frances Elizabeth Appleton Longfellow, heretofore never more than a curiosity on the margins of his story. It will include, too, a portrait of 19th-century literary Boston and Cambridge, and offer a fresh evaluation of Longfellow’s place in the pantheon of American literature. The project will involve primary research at the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Mass., a repository of artifacts and archival materials numbering 800,000 items, as well as at other major collections, and use the principles of materiality to offer added insight and nuance to the major characters

A historical exploration of changes in the English language over 300 years, focusing on differences between American and British national dialects, why they differ, and how the differences are perceived.

This project supports M. Lynne Murphy in writing How America Saved the English Language. Since 2006, Murphy has used her linguistic expertise to engage the public in exploring American and British English through the blog Separated by a Common Language, social media, public talks and media work. While the tongue-in-cheek title serves to draw readers in, the book provides a rigorously researched and reader-friendly examination of why national dialects differ as they do, why they don’t differ more, how they are changing with and despite each other’s influence, and how these issues are often misrepresented due to a range of social-cognitive biases and mistaken beliefs. It incorporates a range of original archival, corpus, and analytical research as well as the synthesis of existing work on the history and status of English. It is aimed to help English users examine biases in treatment of the two dialects (in teaching, editing, media) and appreciate the richness of their language.

The writing of a book placing the well-known art of a popular artist in literary, cultural, historical, and philosophical context to deepen understanding and appreciation of modern art in general.

Few painters are as famous as the great French Impressionist Claude Monet. He is a staple of the museum exhibition circuit, and few masters bring higher prices. His house and gardens in France, with their placid lily ponds, are among the most visited sites in Europe. Using this popularity to attract the widest audience, the book will offer ways of thinking beyond surfaces when looking at modern art. Monet’s Water Lilies appear above all to be a call to visual experience. Their scale and aesthetic presence suspend thoughts of the outside world and its conflicts. Yet when one realizes that these works were made in a period of social and political turmoil-regime changes, the Dreyfus Affair, and WW I—questions must arise about the context—personal, cultural, and historical—in which an artist creates such sumptuous fantasies of nature. By revealing those conditions, it is possible show how Monet’s work—a harbinger of American abstraction—appeals to something deep in modern consciousness.

A book-length study of the social networks that connected the art, writing, film, theater, fashion, and music movements in lower Manhattan during the 1960s and 70s.

The Pop Underground is the first book to provide a thorough account of the interlocking arts scenes that thrived in Lower Manhattan (i.e., “downtown”) during the 1960s and 1970s. Even though these art, writing, film, theater, fashion, and music movements have each been well-documented, this project breaks new ground with its holistic approach. Using interview and archival research methods, it maps the social networks that developed downtown, where artists used DIY (Do It Yourself) media in innovative ways. This contributed to the development of what media scholars refer to as “participatory culture”—which enables everyday people to make and distribute their own creations. The most recent example of this mode of media production is “Web 2.0,” but the origins of that DIY approach can be traced back to those downtown arts scenes. It was a unique period when offbeat artists, gonzo musicians, and other outsiders used indie media to remake popular culture in their own image.

A book-length study of the development of photographic detection, surveillance, and evasion from the 19th century to the present.

"Caught on Camera" will chart the historical transformation of photographic detection, surveillance, and evasion from the 19th century to today. It spans photography's early uses in the capture of facial likenesses through the rise of today's sophisticated facial recognition systems. The book explores how the threats to individual privacy and identity posed by corporate and state surveillance techniques were confronted by earlier generations. From the mugshot to Big Brother, from the family album to the selfie, photography has served both as a source of empowerment and social control. Written in an accessible style for a general reader, the book will demonstrate how study of the past can shed new light on contemporary debates over a topic of public concern. It will contribute to the humanities by integrating modes of analysis that are often disparate, combining the history of science and technology with political history, legal studies, social and cultural history, and visual studies.

A book on how cultural changes in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s shaped blues music recorded in the city, and how that music culture affected developments in education and battles over integration.

“Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and the Rise of Black Cultural Power” (University of Chicago Press, 2017) will describe how Chicago’s social and cultural changes during the 1960s and 1970s reverberated through the rhythm & blues music that was recorded in the city. This book features original interviews with singers, instrumentalists, producers, arrangers, media personalities, politicians, ministers and community representatives. The project will emphasize how developments in education and battles over integration intersected with the music, as well as describing the ascendancy of African American musical entrepreneurs in this city. "Move On Up" will also be one of the few titles to focus on the culture of African American Chicago during the transitional period between the Civil Rights movement and the emergence of Mayor Harold Washington in 1983. My project will also how recently unearthed recordings have reshaped longstanding perceptions of local music making in this era.

The research and writing of a book-length study of the human-animal relationship within the context of changes in broader American culture and life.

An Animals’ History of the United States, under contract with Harvard University Press, presents a path-breaking view of human-animal relationships in U.S. history. Using incisive research, accessible prose, and gripping storytelling, it asks the following questions: How have animals shaped our nation? Where did our contemporary ideas about animals come from? What can we learn about the origins and evolution of the seemingly contradictory practices through which we interact with the creatures we categorize as pets, livestock, wildlife, laboratory subjects, spectacles, and so forth? This project seeks to illuminate these questions by examining the past six centuries of human-animal relationships in what is now the U.S. The resulting work of public scholarship will offer an animals’-eye view of U. S. history since 1400. In the process, this project will make an important contribution to ongoing debates over how we think about and act toward non-human beings.

A book-length exploration of Casablanca's iconic status in American cinematic history.

"Everybody Comes to Rick’s" (under contract with W.W. Norton in the U.S.and Faber & Faber in the U.K.) is fueled by a profound desire to understand what makes a single film so unusually captivating, so enduring, and such a worldwide phenomenon--what makes it, in the eyes of Umberto Eco, not simply a stand-alone production, but somehow representative of all "movies." Through extensive research and reporting, conducting a vast array of interviews with film scholars and professionals, screenwriters and directors, relatives of the cast and crew, and also with the fans themselves, I wish to answer this question. Along the way, I seek to tell a lively, intense, and engaging story whose register of meaning far transcends the mere plot-lines of the film and taps into our continued fascination with motion pictures as a means of self-understanding. The project aims to broaden and complicate received wisdom concerning the film and to provide original insights for a new generation of viewers.

A biography of the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the only person in U.S. history to hold the job of Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, serving both Roosevelt and Truman from 1942 to 1949.

This project will result in a much-needed biographical and political study of the second most powerful man in American strategic decision-making between 1942 and 1949, Admiral William D. Leahy. He was the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the only person in US history to hold the job of Chief of staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. Leahy’s unique place in the American decision making structure is worthy of a new detailed study. Leahy was the only individual to serve continuously during this remarkable seven year period, advising Presidents Roosevelt and Truman on the most sensitive and important international (and at times national) policy matters while serving as the single most important conduit of information between the White House, the armed services, the State Department and the intelligence agencies. He provides an excellent example of the difference between real and perceived power.

A book-length study of a social activist whose writing and organizing activities challenged the conventions of her age.

This is the first major book to examine the life, writing, and influence of Jessica Mitford, a woman who walked away from British aristocracy to eventually revitalize muckraking: one of the oldest forms of American narrative advocacy. Mitford’s three distinct life phases as a peer’s daughter, a communist, and a successful writer were all defined by dogged efforts to shed the precepts of her class and learn to empathize and identify with society’s least empowered. At the center of American civil rights struggles in Oakland, she crossed America’s intransigent color line, anticipating the “New Abolitionist” critique of race and prisons by two decades. Beginning with her 1963 blockbuster The American Way of Death, (an exposé of the funeral industry’s exploitation of the poor), Mitford’s writing re-introduced, and radicalized, Gilded Age ideas of civic responsibility in ways which continue to impact contemporary debates over social inequality, whistle blowing, and the ethics of writing.

The research and writing of a study of anarchism in early 20th-century America, the nation's first age of terror.

The Splendid Dead is an intensely intimate history of political extremism in the early twentieth-century United States, centered on Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who as a young man joined an anarchist group public officials considered the most dangerous in the nation. It is not simply another Sacco-Vanzetti book. Rather, using the remarkable documentary record the celebrated case created, it explores on the most personal level what it meant to live and die for a movement that embraced terror as a path to social change. Through Vanzetti's story it will draw general readers into a movement many of them will find abhorrent,to help them see the complexity that runs through even the most troubling of political impulses. By so doing, it will enrich public discussion of the horrific violence that has done so much to shape and warp our world.

A book-length examination of how Latin American migrants and U.S.-born Latinos have created distinctive forms of city life on both sides of the Rio Grande.

At a time when immigration is at the top of the nation’s agenda, public understanding of the issue is often based upon misapprehensions about human migration and its effect on everyday life in the communities of the United States. I intend to write a widely accessible history of how Latin American migrants have settled in U.S. cities and transformed their adopted neighborhoods while at the same time rebuilding the small towns from which they came. In so doing, I hope to bring five years of scholarly research and writing into the public realm in a form that helps people understand the origins and implications of the growing interdependence of people in cities and towns across the Americas. I do so by exploring the history of the biggest immigrant barrios in two of the nation’s largest cities: Chicago’s Little Village community and Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood.

Research and writing of a book on Luther from 1517 to 1522, the five years during which he transformed from an obscure monk to an outlaw celebrity, to be published in 2017 as part of the commemoration of the Reformation's 500th anniversary.

To help commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, I would use the NEH Public Scholar grant to write a book about Martin Luther between 1517 and 1522--thus from the time that he emerged as an obscure monk until the time that as an outlaw celebrity he came out of hiding and started putting into practice the religious reforms he had been promoting for the past several years. Plenty has of course been written about Luther, who is one of the most famous figures in western history, but I wish especially to focus on Luther the flesh-and-blood monk, rather than the monumental figure who changed the shape of western society. The book, to be written during all of 2016, will be in the form of a narrative intended for general readers, and will be published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

A study of the Nobel-prize-winning British writer Rudyard Kipling’s engagement with the United States, especially during four years he spent living in Vermont. By focusing on Kipling's "American decade" (1889-99), the book will provide a fresh perspective on Kipling's life and works, as well as on the American Gilded Age. 

From 1890 to 1920 and beyond, Rudyard Kipling was the most popular writer in the world, winning a Nobel Prize in 1907, but his reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. “Kipling’s Ark: The Making and Unmaking of an American Writer” seeks to address a conspicuous lacuna in efforts to make sense of Kipling’s varied career. Kipling’s intense engagement with the United States—on a personal, political, and aesthetic level—has never received the attention it deserves. The central focus of my book is Kipling’s American decade, extending from 1889 to 1899, with special attention to his four-year sojourn in Vermont. Seven individual chapters, blending narrative with essayistic elaboration, will address key moments and encounters during the decade, while also offering a fresh perspective—Kipling’s own—on the American Gilded Age, the subject of four previous trade books I have published.

A book on anthropologist Franz Boas (1848-1942) and the role of his jazz-age New York circle in developing the revolutionary view of social customs in "foreign" cultures that came to be known as cultural relativism. The project addresses the resulting transformation in popular attitudes about race, sexuality, and gender over the last century.

The Humanity Lab is a work of intellectual and social history centered on a small band of contrarian social scientists working in jazz-age New York. Led by pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas and including such critical figures as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, this group pioneered a way of seeing the world that is only now coming into broad acceptance. Together, they were puzzling through the details of the theory they would come to call “cultural relativism.” The starting point was the idea that no social customs were advanced or retrograde, higher or lower. Each was, instead, a locally specific solution to some common human problem--an insight that stands alongside many of the great scientific advances of the 20th century. The project addresses the transformation in popular attitudes about race, sexuality, gender, and "foreign" customs over the last century and will result in a single-author book published by a commercial press and aimed at the serious general reader.

A new comprehensive history of the French Revolution for general readers. It will incorporate recent scholarship on contemporaneous debates concerning the rights of women and black slavery, explaining how they were essential to the Revolution while also placing the whole era in a broad global context.

"Free and Equal" will be the first comprehensive history of the French Revolution addressed to general readers in the English-speaking world in a generation. My aim is to bring this great historical drama alive for a broad audience, and to introduce them to the new perspectives on the Revolution that have emerged from the past several decades of new scholarship on the subject. In "Free and Equal," readers will encounter the debates about the rights of women and black slavery that were essential aspects of the Revolution, and see how they change our understanding of traditional topics such as the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the Reign of Terror. My book will treat the French Revolution in a global perspective, emphasizing, for example, that the sweeping reform plans introduced by French ministers in 1787 coincided with the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, called to deal with the perceived weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation.

In 1927 Bennett Cerf and a colleague founded Random House, which published many of the most prominent American authors of the 20th century, from William Faulkner to Dr. Seuss. This biography will tell the story of Cerf's life, which straddled high culture and mass entertainment: not only did he profoundly shape the course of  American publishing, he was also a celebrity thanks to his slot on the popular television show "What's My Line?"

At a time when digital disruption and globalization are reshaping book culture, presenting new challenges and new opportunities, this biography-cum-history, an independent work of scholarship, focuses on the life of Bennett Cerf (1898-1971), asserting that he was the greatest American publisher of the 20th century. It examines how Cerf’s story and that of Random House, the company he co-founded, inform American culture today. How did he build the preeminent publishing house, a living force able to fight successfully to publish Ulysses, that went on to encompass Faulkner and Dr. Seuss, Capote and Ayn Rand, Portnoy’s Complaint and Rosemary’s Baby, Knopf and Pantheon and the Modern Library? There has never been a biography of Cerf, a man who straddled culture both high and mass, through books – those he published and those he wrote - magazines, TV, Hollywood and Broadway. Why is it that this most “public” of American publishers is so forgotten today? A reassessment is long overdue.

The first full-length biography of Sarah Childress Polk (1803-1891), wife of United States President James K. Polk. Mrs. President explains how Polk wielded a degree of political authority unprecedented at the time for a woman, and more broadly considers the workings of female political power in nineteenth-century America.

In a period when women were both disenfranchised and supposedly “unfit” for both politics and business, Sarah Childress Polk (1803-1891) exercised an unprecedented degree of political authority as “Mrs. President,” the wife, political partner, and personal secretary of the eleventh president of the United States. My narrative biography of the first political First Lady, under contract with Alfred A. Knopf Press, is the first full-length biography about a public figure whose experience harnessing the power of submission holds the potential to transform reigning historical narratives about female power before the franchise, and the role of women in American presidential politics.

A new treatment of what historians often call  "the Progressive Era," this book shows how the meaning of American nation-building underwent a profound shift in the years 1896 to 1929--from knitting together geographic regions to knitting together diverse peoples and cultures--just as the U.S. was emerging as a world power, international economic leader, and reservoir of displaced persons from around the globe.

A reinterpretation of the early twentieth century US, the study explores the transformation of American nationhood between 1896 and 1929 -- the era in which the United States emerged as a world power, international economic leader, and reservoir for displaced persons from across the globe. Most studies of the period have focused on the so-called Progressive Era. They overlook the larger processes of national integration and transformation that the Progressives, their rivals and their successors negotiated. At the same time, the book addresses enduring questions about nation-building: both as a process -- how can people build functioning nation-states out of diverse regions and peoples -- and as a matter of concept: what are the constituents of a nation? How do people understand nationhood and how have those conceptions changed over time? The US in this period offers a telling case because nation-building shifted from knitting together regions to integrating diverse peoples and cultures.

Examines the assertion made famous by French mathematical physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827)  that a scientific view of the universe leaves no room for God, free will, or human dignity. Starting with LaPlace but leading the reader through the work of thinkers from Galileo and Newton to contemporary philosophers of science, the book considers how theism and humanism might be reconciled with science after all.

This project will produce a book for a general audience examining the widespread assumption that the sciences threaten our humanistic self-understanding because they imply a view of the world that is deterministic and reductionistic. I frame the discussion around Laplace's assertion, when asked the place of God in his physics, that "I have no need of that hypothesis", and the idea of "Laplace's Demon."  The book examines determinism and reductionism, and the challenges they face from quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and contemporary philosophy of science, arguing that a proper understanding of science poses no threat to human dignity, free will, theism, or the possibility of miracles, drawing upon previous works by the author written for scholarly audiences but presenting them in a form geared to the educated public.