Louis Evans Professor of History, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor
About
Matt Lassiter is a scholar of the twentieth-century United States with a research and teaching focus on political history, urban/suburban studies, racial and social inequality, and the history of policing and the carceral state. His most recent book, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, was published in 2023 by Princeton University Press. He is also author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006); coeditor of The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press, 2009); and lead author of the website exhibit Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era (2021). Lassiter is co-director of the U-M Carceral State Project and co-PI of its Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance research initiative. He is also director of the affiliated Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, which involves undergraduate and graduate student researchers in collaborative public engagement projects. He is also a series editor of “Politics and Culture in Modern America,” published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Selected Publications:
The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs (Princeton University Press, 2023)
Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era (2021), collaborative digital exhibit
Civil Rights in America: Racial Discrimination in Housing (National Historical Landmarks Program, 2020)
“Ten Propositions for the New Political History,” Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
“Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs,” Journal of American History (June 2015)
“Suburban Diversity in Postwar America,” Journal of Urban History (January 2013), coauthored with Christopher Niedt
“Political History Beyond the Red-Blue Divide,” Journal of American History (December 2011)
The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press, 2009), coedited with Joseph Crespino.
The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006)
Affiliation(s)
- Urban Planning
- American Culture
Field(s) of Study
- political history
- urban/suburban studies
- racial and social inequality
- policing and the carceral state
