Joseph Crespino

Joseph Crespino, Associate Professor (B.A., Northwestern University, 1994; M.A. (Secondary School Education), University of Mississippi, 1996; M.A., Ph.D. (American History), Stanford University, 2002). Political and Social History of Twentieth-Century America; Southern History Since Reconstruction. Author of In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and The Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton University Press, Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America series, 2007), winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, the McLemore Prize given by the Mississippi Historical Society, and the Nonfiction Prize given by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.

My research interests are in the political culture of twentieth century America. I am currently working on two books. The first is an edited collection with Matt Lassiter at the University of Michigan tentatively titled “The End of Southern History? Integrating the Modern South and the Nation.” The essays grapple with the political and historiographic implications of the decline of southern distinctiveness in the post World War II period, when dramatic changes in the southern political economy undermined the structural forces that had long alienated the region from other parts of the country. We argue that southern exceptionalism was a key element in the construction of modern American political identity; the nation could be figured as modern, progressive, and liberal in large part because of the implicit juxtaposition with the outdated, backwards, conservative South.

My second book, tentatively titled "Strom Thurmond’s America," is a political biography of the 1948 States Rights Democratic Party presidential candidate and longtime U.S. Senator from South Carolina. The book will use Thurmond as a lens through which to view both the convergence of southern and national politics as well as the rise of modern conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Curriculum Vitae