It might seem a bit bold to include “intelligent popular culture” in the url of this website. But let me emphasize that it is aspirational. I have no, or little, idea of whether the material on this website is/will be either intelligent or popular. But that's the aspiration and not only for this website. In forty-plus years of reading, writing, and talking about American history and politics, I have come to despair of the idiocy of much of popular culture, its lack of intelligence, its divorce from anything that really matters. So while I taught American history (yes, I'm a professor but don't hold that against me) with an emphasis on politics, including political philosophy, I also taught courses on movies, baseball, and other popular culture topics, always with an eye to bringing out their larger significance for American values, attitudes, and actions.
I'm retired now. Toward the end of my years of teaching, I began to think about a final book project. I had long promised myself that I would write my baseball book when I reached my “dotage.” Having arrived there, I unfortunately found myself struggling with a serious disease. So I do not know that I'll ever write that final book, imagined as “Baseball's World Series, 1947-1963,” but I hope to at least get some of its rudiments and ideas onto this website, along with a bunch of other (I think, creative) stuff I've generated over the years. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Addendum: As I've started to edit the documents posted here, it has occurred to me that what I did as both a teacher and a writer is take often dense, even obscure, scholarly materials and interpret them for undergraduates (and general readers - although I do know I got few of those), turning the material into, well, intelligent popular culture. The opening of the “Revenge of the Metaphysical Club” syllabus (see Random Posts) and the “Ed” Dimendberg Files (see Film Noir) are two examples of what (I think) I'm talking about.
Selected Publications
What I think of as my trilogy of urban space
The Mysteries of the Great City: The Politics of Urban Design: This came out of my dissertation, what I thought of as an effort to explicate the context that gave rise to professional city planning and the consequences of that. I should have subtitled it, Power and Urban Form, because that’s really what it’s about.
The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumph and Tragedies in the American City: Yes, the title is a play on John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems. I’m a great admirer of John Dewey but I thought he emphasized the “problems” at the expense of the role of imagination, creativity, and possibility that makes the public the key agency of change.
*Crossing Great Divides: City and Country in Environmental and Political Disorder *I should have used Green Populism as the title of this one (I never seem to get titles quite right), if only to prevent the book, as happened, from disappearing without a trace. The book does end with a plea for a green version of populism. The project came out of my long interest in ecology and environmental politics, as well as my own biography of intersecting urban and rural experiences.
Other Books:
Bringing the Civic Back In: Zane L. Miller and American Urban History: What I think of as the culmination of many years of interest in the historiography of my subfield, urban history. The opportunity to offer a fair and admiring assessment of my long-time editor, mentor, and friend Zane L. Miller made this a labor of love.
*Oakley: From Hamlet to the Center of Cincinnati: *I’d long been something of an oddity among urban historians, as I lived in a rural community. But I eventually moved “back to the city,” and did what I think of as the quintessential urban historian thing to do, i.e. writing a history of my own neighborhood.