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). I am a historian of the United States in the twentieth century, with particular interests in the American South, post-World War II America, and the history and memory of the modern civil rights movement. My first book examined white resistance to civil rights and conservative politics in post-World War II Mississippi. I recently co-edited a collection of essays with Matthew Lassiter of the University of Michigan titled The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism.

I am currently writing a political biography of Strom Thurmond, the longtime U.S. Senator from South Carolina and an icon of the white South’s massive resistance to the civil rights movement.  Often Thurmond is remembered as one of the last of the Jim Crow demagogues, and rightly so.  But he was also among the first of the post-war Sunbelt conservatives, a key contributor to an emerging coalition of southerners and westerners in mid-century America who would help reorient American politics by the closing decades of the twentieth century.  My book will argue that it is important that we understand Thurmond in these dual contexts, as both a white southerner and an American conservative.  Doing so will help challenge some of the received categories and conventional wisdom about the political history of both the South and the nation in the second half of the twentieth century.  For more about this project you can read a recent interview here.

My next project I imagine as a broadly based study of Christianity and democracy in civil rights era America.