To Promote the General Welfare
The Case for Big Government
Edited by Steven Conn
Author Information
Steven Conn is Professor and Director of Public History at Ohio State University. His books include Do Museums Still Need Objects?, Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past, and History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. He is the founding editor of the online magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.
Contributors:
Brian Balogh is a professor in the University of Virginia's Department of History and Chair of the National Fellowship Program at the Miller Center. He is also co-host of the public radio show "Backstory with the American History Guys." Balogh's latest book is A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (2009).
Kevin Boyle teaches history at Ohio State University. He's the author of The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (1995) and Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004), co-author of Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, 1900-1930 (1997), and editor of Organized Labor and American Politics: The Labor-Liberal Alliance, 1894-1994 (1998).
Steven Conn is Professor of History at Ohio State University where he also directs Public History initiatives. To Promote the General Welfare is his sixth book project. He has written regularly for newspapers around the country and is the founding editor of the on-line magazine "Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective."
Paul Light is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at NYU's Robert Wagner School of Public Service. He has previously been the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the Director of the Public Policy Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts. He is the author of numerous books including, Government's Greatest Achievements: From Civil Rights to Homeland Defense (2002) and A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It (2008).
Richard R. John is a professor in the Ph. D. program in communications at the Columbia School of Journalism, where he teaches courses on business, technology, communications, and political development. His publications include Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010) and Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995).
Zachary Schrag is associate professor of history at George Mason University. He is the author of The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (2006) and Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009 (2010).
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer has published widely on the intersecting histories of labor, business, capitalism, policy, and politics, topics covered in her first book Creating the Sunbelt: Phoenix and the Political-Economy of Metropolitan Growth. She is the Paul Mellon Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge and an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago.
Thomas J. Sugrue is David Boies Professor of History and Sociology and Director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His books include The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996); The New Suburban History, with Kevin M. Kruse (2005); Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008), and Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (2010). He is writing a history of the real estate industry in modern America.
Karen Kruse Thomas is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She published Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935-1954 (2011) and is currently completing a history of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Jonathan Zimmerman is Professor of Education and History at New York University. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher, Zimmerman is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (2009) and three other books. He is also a frequent op-ed contributor to the New York Time, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and other popular newspapers and magazines.
