Faculty

Gary Gerstle 
James Stahlman Professor of History
Professor of Political Science

PhD, Harvard University, 1982

Twentieth-century U.S. history, with emphasis on politics and society; immigration, ethnicity, and nationality; and labor   

Telephone:  615-322-5950
Email:  gary.gerstle@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: W 3:00-5:00 pm, by appointment.
Office: Benson Hall 112

Gary Gerstle is a historian of the twentieth-century United States, with particular interest in three major areas of inquiry: 1) immigration, race, and nationality; 2) the significance of class in social and political life; 3) and social movements, popular politics, and the state.  Gerstle is the author, co-author, and co-editor of six books and the author of more than twenty-five articles on these topics.  Working-Class Americanism (Cambridge, 1989) explores issues of class, ethnicity, and Americanization among workers and their unions during the Great Depression.  American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), winner of the 2001 Saloutos Prize for the outstanding work in immigration and ethnic history, examines how the modern American nation was shaped by the robust, protean, and contradictory traditions of civic and racial nationalism.  The Rise and Fall of the New Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, 1989), a book Gerstle co-edited with Steve Fraser, analyzes how the Democratic Party and liberalism came to dominate American politics from the 1930s through the 1960s and why both collapsed in the 1970s.  A second book co-edited with Fraser, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Harvard, 2005), explores how ruling elites have taken shape in America and how they have gained and lost political power.  Gerstle has also co-edited  E Pluribus Unum?  (Russell Sage, 2001), an examination of past and current immigration to the United States, and he has coauthored Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (Wadsworth), a college and high school AP textbook, now in its Fifth Edition.  He is currently writing Governing America, an interpretive history of national and state government power in the United States from the Revolution to the present.  Once that book is finished, he will return to a hemispheric project on race and nation in the United States, Cuba, and Mexico, 1880-1940, the first installment of which appears in a volume, Nationalism in the Americas (Georgia, 2006, and Editor Record [in Brazil], 2007), co-edited by Don Doyle and Marco Pamplona.   

Gerstle has received numerous fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.  He has served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociale in Paris.  In addition to France, he has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada, England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, and Japan. He was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2005 and named a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians in 2007.  Gerstle has also lectured widely to the general public, and is often consulted by newspapers reporters, magazine writers, and television producers on matters pertinent to his areas of historical expertise.  In May 2007, Gerstle testified on questions of immigration before the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill.   

A book series, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America, that Gerstle co-edits for Princeton University Press has published more than twenty-five books, many of them prizewinners.  Gerstle has served on the editorial board of the Journal of American History, and the nominating board of the Association of American Studies.  He is currently serving on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review.

Gerstle teaches a wide variety of courses, including an introduction to U.S. history (at both the undergraduate and graduate level), America in the first half of the twentieth century, and seminars on subjects such as the history of American nationhood and nationality, U.S. labor history, and the state.  He is currently advising twelve graduate students, ten of whom are writing dissertations on a wide range of topics in U.S. history. 
Before coming to Vanderbilt in 2006, Gerstle taught at the University of Maryland, where he was Director of the Center for Historical Studies (2000-2003) and Chair of the Department of History (2003-2006).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright ©2007 Vanderbilt University