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Being born and raised into a working-class family in Youngstown, Ohio, and witness to the steel era decline in the seventies and eighties encouraged me to study the negotiation of power between governments, business, and the people. Using culture and oral history as the lens to view the Depression era and the 1960s, my research and teaching has focused on how the people redefined themselves, their government, and society in this era of swirling change. 

Using the replication of text, images, and ideology, my most recent book, Modernity and the Great Depression: The Transformation of American Society (Kansas University Press, 2017) examines the acceptance and legitimation of modernism during the 1930s to suggest a secular reformation lay at the heart of the Depression era and had profound influence on the decades that followed.

My current research involves the intersection of Wonder and Fear during the Depression era and how these ideas came to define the modern American experience.