Department of History | The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 East 59th Street, Mailbox 67
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 834-1271 -- Office
(773) 702-7550 -- Fax
Email: jts@uchicago.edu
On Leave: Autumn 2009 and Winter 2010

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.

Publications

Americanism and Entitlement: Authorizing Big Government in an Age of Total War (book manuscript)

"A Nation in Motion: Norfolk, the Pentagon, and Regional Reconfiguration, 1941-1953," in The End of Southern History? Integrating the Modern South and the Nation, ed. Joseph Crespino and Matthew Lassiter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

"'Buying Our Boys Back': The Mass Foundations of Fiscal Citizenship in World War II," Journal of Policy History 20.2 (April 2008): 263-86.

"Hot War, Cold War: The Structures of Sociological Action, 1940-1955," with Andrew Abbott, in Sociology in America: The American Sociological Association Centennial History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

The Department of History

The University of Chicago

IN THIS SECTION

Faculty

Visiting Faculty

Emeriti Faculty

Associated Faculty

James T. Sparrow

Assistant Professor of U. S. History
Ph.D. Brown University, 2002