Kruse, Kevin M. 1972- (Kevin Michael Kruse)

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Kruse, Kevin M. 1972- (Kevin Michael Kruse)

PERSONAL:

Born 1972. Education: University of North Carolina, B.A., 1994; Cornell University, M.A., 1997, Ph.D., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Princeton University, Department of History, 215 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor, 2000-06, David L. Rike University Preceptor of History, 2003-06, associate professor of history, 2006—, associate chair of department of history, 2006—.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Southern Historical Association, Urban History Association, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Henry Sage Fellowship, Cornell University, 1994-95; Andrew Mellon Fellowship, 1997; Industrial and Labor Relations Fellowship, Cornell University, 1998; John S. Knight Prize for Freshman Writing Seminars, Cornell University, 1998; Hughes-Gossett Prize, Supreme Court Historical Society, 1998; Ihlder Fellowship, Cornell University, 1998; Andrew Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, 1999-2000; Spencer Foundation research grant, 2002; Behrman Fellowship in the Humanities, Princeton University, 2006-08. Malcolm and Muriel Barrow Bell Award for Best Book in Georgia History, Georgia Historical Society, Francis B. Simkins Award, Southern Historical Association, and Best Book in Urban Politics, American Political Science Association, all 2007, all for White Flight. Named one of the "Top Innovators in the Arts and Sciences," Smithsonian magazine.

WRITINGS:

White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2005.

(Editor, with Thomas J. Sugrue, and contributor) The New Suburban History, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2006.

(Editor, with Gyan Prakash) The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2008.

Contributor to books, including Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, edited by Clive Webb, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2005. Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of Urban History, St. Louis University Law Journal, Journal of Supreme Court History, Journal of Southern History, American Historical Review, Social History, American Journal of Legal History, and Reviews in American History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Kevin M. Kruse is a historian, writer, and educator. As a scholar, he "studies the political, social, and urban/suburban history of twentieth-century America, with particular interest in the making of modern conservatism. Focused on conflicts over race, rights, and religion, he also studies the postwar South and modern suburbia," noted a biographer on the Princeton University Department of History Web site. Kruse is a frequent lecturer and presenter at academic conferences, and he is a prolific contributor and manuscript referee for professional journals and academic publishers.

With his White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, Kruse explores how resistance to racial desegregation and the abandonment of urban areas by whites influenced the rise and development of the contemporary political conservative moment. "In a beautifully written, clearly structured, and deeply researched narrative, Kruse lays out the historical processes that led to the development of modern conservatism," noted Karen Ferguson in the Urban History Review. Further, "he demonstrates that racial integration never happened in Atlanta—and, by implication, in much of the nation," remarked Bruce Nelson in the Journal of Southern History.

Though Kruse focuses on Atlanta, it was a process that occurred throughout the United States. Atlanta, Kruse notes, "has had a nationwide reputation for racial moderation and economic progress, especially when compared to other cities in the South," Ferguson stated. Atlanta, observed Ronald Brownstein in the American Prospect, had styled itself as a "city too busy to hate." But, in his examination of the historical underpinnings of racial flight in this city, Kruse finds that the majority of white Atlanta residents were vigorously opposed to racial desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, and that Atlanta demonstrated a sophisticated political approach to white flight that avoided racial dynamics but instead couched the departure of whites for the suburbs in terms of democracy, individual rights, and Americanism, Ferguson reported. "As the black percentage of Atlanta's population continued to grow, whites increasingly abandoned the city for the suburbs, where they reconstructed the segregated enclaves that they regarded as essential to their well-being," Nelson stated. Throughout the book, Kruse's account vividly takes "readers from the mayor's office, to black churches and elite corporate boardrooms, to the block-by-block, sometimes house-to-house, battle over racial transition in blue-collar neighborhoods, as the city grappled with integration in housing, schools, public transportation, hotels, and restaurants," Brownstein commented.

In The New Suburban History, edited by Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, contributors consider the rise of the American suburb. They note that in 1950, a quarter of all Americans lived in suburbs; by the 1990s, the majority of Americans were suburbanites, noted a writer on the University of Chicago Press Web site. This "transformation of the United States into an increasingly suburban nation has profoundly affected every aspect of American life, and as such belongs at center stage in our still-developing postwar history." Kruse and Sugrue present ten essays by current historians working in the field of suburban studies. Among the suburban areas examined by the editors and contributors are Washington, DC; New York, New York; Detroit, Michigan; Charlotte, North Carolina; and San Francisco, California. The authors provide insight on various ethnic suburban populations, including Latino, African American, and Asian suburban dwellers, as well as the importance of the suburbs to American laborers and blue-collar workers. A recurring theme is that of race, and issues such as how government loan policies kept African Americans out of the suburbs and segregated in the central areas of the cities.

Kruse and Sugrue also contribute to the book, noting the vital importance of the development of suburbs in American society, and asserting that modern American history cannot be properly understood without a deep consideration of the prominence of suburban environments in the everyday lives of most Americans. "Drawing upon excellent research and an area-wide perspective, the essays in Kruse and Sugrue's book reveal metropolitan and suburban America as fragmented, isolated, fearful, and riddled by class and racial divisions," according to Evelyn Gonzalez in the Michigan Historical Review.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, October, 2007, Bruce M. Stave, review of The New Suburban History, p. 1133.

American Prospect, February, 2006, Ronald Brownstein, "How the South Rose Again," review of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, p. 51.

Choice, October, 2006, R. Muccigrosso, review of White Flight, p. 359.

Journal of American History, September, 2006, Jeff Roche, review of White Flight, p. 601; March, 2007, Nicholas Dagen Bloom, review of The New Suburban History, p. 1309.

Journal of Economic History, March, 2007, Leah Platt Boustan, review of The New Suburban History, p. 243.

Journal of Southern History, February, 2007, Bruce Nelson, review of White Flight, p. 226.

Michigan Historical Review, spring, 2007, Evelyn Gonzalez, review of The New Suburban History, p. 152.

Pacific Historical Review, November, 2007, Amanda I. Seligman, review of The New Suburban History, p. 668.

Smithsonian, October, 2007, Dick Polman, "Civil Wrongs," review of White Flight.

Social Service Review, September, 2007, Bruce D. Haynes, review of The New Suburban History, p. 564.

Urban Geography, November 15, 2007, Bernadette Hanlon, review of The New Suburban History, p. 508.

Urban History Review, fall, 2006, Karen Ferguson, review of White Flight, p. 61.

Weekly Standard, May 15, 2006, Joseph M. Knippenberg, "Burning Atlanta; The Reagan Revolution Did Not Begin on Peachtree Street," review of White Flight.