About

Bruce J. Schulman is the William E. Huntington Professor of History at Boston University, specializing in 20th-century U.S. history. His research concentrates on the relationships between politics and broader cultural change in modern America. Schulman has authored three books, including 'From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt,' 'Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism,' and 'The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Politics, and Society,' the latter of which was named one of The New York Times' Notable Books of the Year for 2001. He has also edited several volumes on American political history and public policy, contributing to the scholarly discourse on American history and politics. In addition to his research, Schulman is actively involved in teaching and curriculum reform efforts. He has directed research fellowships and mentored 32 doctoral students, many of whom have gone on to faculty positions at various universities. His teaching excellence has been recognized through awards such as the Charles and Harriet Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching, and the Nancy Lyman Roelker Award for graduate mentorship. Schulman also directs the Institute for American Political History at Boston University, which aims to establish the university as a leading center for the study of America's political past, organizing seminars, conferences, and fostering academic collaboration.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Geography
• Law

Selected publications

• A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America

  Journal of American History · 2025-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The <i>(New)</i> American Political Tradition

  Modern American History · 2024-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The year 2023 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It —a bestselling book that captured the imagination of many of Hofstadter's fellow Americans in the early postwar period and, at the same time, defined the terms of argument for much of academic history for the next generation. 1 It was also the book my high school teacher, Mr. Backfish, assigned in eleventh-grade Advanced Placement (AP) American History that helped transform me into a historian. So different was it from the dry, conventional textbook in both its riveting, sometimes acerbic prose and its unsentimental view of venerated figures in the American past. I still have my original copy (Figure 1).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Paul Sabin. <i>Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2022-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Since the election of Ronald Reagan, scholars of modern American politics have struggled to explain the collapse of the New Deal order and the emergence of conservatism. Over the past four decades, historians debated the forces that unraveled the postwar liberal consensus—was it economic malaise, racial conflict, the Vietnam War?—and played a Where’s Waldo? game trying to identify the origins of the conservative ascendancy among, alternately, suburban housewives in the Sunbelt, conservative intellectuals at obscure opinion magazines, business leaders bristling at the power of organized labor, evangelical Christians alarmed by advancing secularism, northern white ethnics opposed to busing, and homeowners alarmed by skyrocketing property taxes. In this lively, ambitious, and thought-provoking reinterpretation of modern US political history, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism, Paul Sabin insists the scholarly pack has barked up the wrong tree. Criticizing extant scholarship for simplistically “blaming conservatives for the end of the New Deal order” (165), Sabin shifts responsibility for the attack on big government and the unraveling of liberal reform away from Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement. Like an ingenious trial attorney, Sabin not only absolves conservatives of the charges but he places the smoking gun in the hand of the real culprits: Ralph Nader and the broader public interest movement he helped to form. Launching an intellectual and legal attack on the post–World War II administrative state, the environmental, consumer protection, and public interest movements of the 1960s and 1970s pioneered new strategies of public action, like citizen lawsuits, and created an alternative establishment made up by public interest law firms, liberal foundations, and nonprofit advocacy groups. Informed by New Left critiques of the corrupting influence of institutional power, they founded “a proliferating array of small, independent, issue-based nonprofit organizations” (57) that developed both an ideological critique of the insulated, unaccountable power of government bureaucrats and the institutional tools to challenge their autonomy. In the process, the public interest movement undermined the cooperation among business, labor, and government that had sustained postwar liberalism and softened it up for attack from the right. “We have lost touch,” Sabin argues, “with how the struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s destabilized the old framework for business and government, predating many conservative attacks, yet failed to provide a coherent and politically viable replacement” (xiv).

  PublisherDOI

• Islands in Time, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Decade

  Reviews in American History · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Islands in Time, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Decade Bruce J. Schulman (bio) A bobbed-haired flapper dances across the ballroom floor, cigarette dangling scandalously from her lips; a family of gaunt, hollow-eyed Okies pilot a beatup sedan, their tattered belongings tied to the roof; a long-haired, tie-dyed flock vibrate on the San Francisco panhandle as the Grateful Dead play in the background; angry motorists wait in line for rationed gasoline. For students of modern U.S. History, these images immediately conjure distinctive decades of the twentieth century. The almost-automatic association of those scenes with the Twenties, Thirties, Sixties, and Seventies signals the influence of the decade in the popular historical imagination. For nearly a century now, Americans have reckoned their history in ten-year-long blocks, constructing islands in time, each with its own distinctive atmosphere, its signature cultural artifacts, its peculiar meaning. While many have made their peace with this trend, professional historians have mainly bristled at the baleful influence of such arbitrary markers. In his 2017 cri di coeur for the journal Modern American History, Christopher Capozzola named as the field's most urgent task the "revolt against the tyrannical oppression of the decade, easily the least helpful concept in the toolkit of modern American historians."1 Much as Marc Bloch derided the "insidious" tendency to demarcate European history as a pendulum-swinging progression of centuries, historians have assailed chroniclers of the twentieth century United States for setting aside "experience-oriented chronological markers"—wars, epidemics, depressions, revolutions and the other real stuff of history—in favor of the decimal system.2 "We merrily tick off decades," Warren Susman complained, "give them tricky names, and assume that that is what history is all about."3 Worse still, the tyranny of the decade distorts the historical record. It stresses evanescent, short-term trends, exaggerates change, and, in Susman's indictment, leaves "no room in American scholarship for Fernand Braudel's vision of extended time."4 Such unhealthy attachment to years that end with zero, what Bloch famously labeled "these faces in arithmetical masks," not [End Page 322] only compresses the scale of American historical development, emphasizing transient fads and presidential elections over long-term demographic patterns and durable policy regimes, it also privileges particular brands of history and relies on a vague conception of mass culture: a set of collective public experiences, widely shared through and structured by mass media and mass consumption.5 And while a few recent studies have investigated decades as transnational phenomena, the prevalent association of decades with the detritus of American popular culture also obscures the global dimensions of many seemingly peculiar domestic developments.6 "Decade-ism" has occasioned so much scorn that even Saturday Night Live satirized it. In a December 1979 episode, "Weekend Update's Social Sciences Editor" Al Franken bade good riddance to the solipsistic "Me Decade" and predicted the arrival of the "Al Franken Decade." "Why that?" the comedian asked. "Well, because I thought of it, and I'm on TV, so I've already gotten the jump on you. So, I say let's leave behind the fragmented, selfish '70s, and go into the '80s with a unity and purpose." You can almost see scholarly critics of the decade smiling in agreement at the absurdity of the practice.7 The decade, then, offers critics an easy target. Still, Susman and Capozzola's jabs hardly constitute knockout blows. A peculiarly modern, pre-eminently American invention, the decade remains standing, especially for scholars of twentieth-century U.S. History. It has spawned and continues to nurture a distinctive genre of historical analysis—the decade book—and its holistic approach offers useful correctives to the balkanization of historical subfields. Dismissing the decade as artificial and distorting ignores the concept's peculiar history and the genre's distinctive contributions. Inventing the Decade: Frederick Lewis Allen and the 1920s In 1931, Frederick Lewis Allen, a true scion of the American Establishment, concocted the decade book. Allen, then Associate Editor of Harper's Magazine, not only created an enduring genre of American historical literature, he pretty much invented the decade as contemporaries now imagine and use...

  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 5. Persistent Whiggery: Federal Entitlements and Southern Politics

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Geography
  PublisherDOI

• Post-1968 U.S. History: Neo-Consensus History for the Age of Polarization

  Reviews in American History · 2019-01-01 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Post-1968 U.S. History:Neo-Consensus History for the Age of Polarization Bruce J. Schulman (bio) In 1967, amidst the political turmoil of the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, the New Left and the mobilization of movement conservatism, Richard Hofstadter wrote a new preface to accompany the 20th anniversary edition of his 1948 book, The American Political Tradition and The Men Who Made It. Somewhat sheepishly, Hofstadter reflected on the enterprise that had become known as Consensus History, an approach that current events and a decade of historical scholarship had seemed to undermine. Looking back at his younger self, Hofstadter explained that he had attempted to look at American politics from "outside the tradition itself." From that "external angle of vision the differences that seem very sharp and decisive to those who dwelt altogether within it had begun to lose their distinctness, and that men on different sides of a number of questions appeared as having more in common, in the end, than originally imagined" (p. xxvii). Put another way, the intense partisan rivalries and passionate ideological allegiances, the differences that seemed to separate Democrats from Republicans, liberals from conservatives, South from North, even whites and non-whites, masked an essential consensus—a set of shared assumptions, norms and structures that narrowed the range of policy outcomes and reinforced a particular set of power relations. Although few contemporary scholars embrace the label, something like consensus history has made a comeback: "Neo-Consensus History" dominates the historiography of the United States since the late 1960s. Deploying a variety of methodologies and focusing on a wide range of historical actors, scholars of recent American history have attempted to "move beyond" red and blue, left and right, North and South, even in some cases black and white. In this historiography, an enterprise that spans intellectual history, political history, the history of political economy, urban history, and the history of race relations, the partisan competition and political conflict that attracts so much attention from pundits and defines conventional narratives of contemporary U.S. society is mostly noise. The editors of an anthology of new work in American political [End Page 479] history assert that dominant paradigms, ideas such as the New Deal order, the conservative ascendancy, and red-blue polarization, "obscure deeper forms of consensus around global capitalism, white privilege, patriarchy, and notions of American exceptionalism. . ."1 Of course, consensus history retains an unsavory reputation. Identifying a scholar with it has long been a kind of dismissive insult; the brand implies an uncritical, rah-rah celebration of American exceptionalism (a charge that applies to writers like Daniel Boorstin, though not to Hofstadter, who bemoaned the consensus he identified).2 Although consensus literally means agreement, for Hofstadter and other likeminded historians, it did not signal comity—or the absence of vociferous argument—but a set of structures that shape the choices of political actors and restrict the possible outcomes. In recent years, several strains of scholarship that Hofstadter might recognize as neo-consensus history have taken root in the historiography of the recent United States: the carceral state interpretation, which frames the bipartisan embrace of mass incarceration as the defining feature of the modern American state and the bedrock of contemporary U.S. politics; a spatial analysis that locates in the suburbs a set of attitudes and policy preferences that cut across regions and partisan divides; the theory of neoliberalism, which not only dismisses the significance of partisan division within the United States but submerges differences among western industrial nations; and an intellectual history version associated most prominently with Daniel Rodgers that sees a common vocabulary and intellectual orientation bridging left and right. These neo-consensus histories illuminate structural phenomena much as Hofstadter's generation did, but consider broader sets of historical actors and work from deeper archival bases than the analyses of elite politicians and intellectuals that occupied the original consensus historians. In different ways, these four scholarly trends advance a common enterprise: they identify forces more fundamental and enduring than the partisan and ideological conflicts that seem to dominate contemporary American politics. They also point out a paradox, a sort of cognitive dissonance. If Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative...

  PublisherDOI

• White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

  Journal of American History · 2018-05-02 · 92 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In 1986 a spiral-bound cookbook from an obscure publisher became a sensational best seller. Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking rode a wave of nostalgia for a vanishing way of life that infused popular culture and political debate during the 1970s and 1980s. Films, TV shows, novels, songs, comic strips, political rhetoric, and recipes participated in this celebration of rural white southerners. The book's title alienated some readers, but, on the very first page, Mickler differentiated between lower case “white trash” and his own capitalized version: “manners and pride separate the two.” Claiming his poor southern upbringing as an ethnic identity, Mickler participated in what Nancy Isenberg labels “the white trash makeover”—a widespread effort to rebrand a “depressed class background as a distinct (and perversely noble) heritage” (p. 270). But at the same time, White Trash Cooking continued what Isenberg characterizes as a centuries-long pattern of class stratification. By distinguishing lower-class white trash from their respectable brethren, Mickler perpetuated a long-standing tradition of writing the poor out of the national community. Americans, Isenberg argues, have long depicted the nation's class boundaries as permeable; they assumed that open land and economic abundance fueled social mobility and marked the United States as an exceptional society, a departure from a world of rigid social structures and fixed aristocracies. Isenberg insists that, on the contrary, class distinctions have remained a durable, much less malleable feature of American society than most observers have admitted. Like they have done with race and ethnicity, Americans have mapped class onto people's bodies—that is, they have viewed it as an immutable characteristic. Class identity has also closely correlated with land ownership: “For much of American history, the worst classes were seen as extrusions of the worst land: scrubby, barren, and swampy wasteland. Home ownership remains today the measure of social mobility” (p. xxxix).

  PublisherDOI

• Recapturing the Oval Office

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2017-01-30

  bookSenior author

  Several generations of historians figuratively abandoned the Oval Office as the bastion of out-of-fashion stories of great men. And now, decades later, the historical analysis of the American presidency remains on the outskirts of historical scholarship, even as policy and political history have rebounded within the academy. In Recapturing the Oval Office, leading historians and social scientists forge an agenda for returning the study of the presidency to the mainstream practice of history and they chart how the study of the presidency can be integrated into historical narratives that combine rich analyses of political, social, and cultural history. The authors demonstrate how "bringing the presidency back in" can deepen understanding of crucial questions regarding race relations, religion, and political economy. The contributors illuminate the conditions that have both empowered and limited past presidents, and thus show how social, cultural, and political contexts matter. By making the history of the presidency a serious part of the scholarly agenda in the future, historians have the opportunity to influence debates about the proper role of the president today. Contributors: Brian Balogh, University of Virginia; Michael A. Bernstein, Tulane University; Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Purdue University; N. D. B. Connolly, The Johns Hopkins University; Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut; Gareth Davies, University of Oxford; Darren Dochuk, Washington University; Susan J. Douglas, University of Michigan; Daniel J. Galvin, Northwestern University; William I. Hitchcock, University of Virginia; Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University; Alice O'Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara; Bruce J. Schulman, Boston University; Robert O. Self, Brown University; Stephen Skowronek, Yale University

  PublisherDOI

• Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s

  The SHAFR Guide Online · 2017-10-02 · 1 citations

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julian E. Zelizer

  7 shared

• William R. Keylor

  1 shared

• Jack Falla

  1 shared

• Andrew Preston

  1 shared

• Neil R. McMillen

  1 shared

• Samuel McCracken

  1 shared

• Paula Fredriksen

  1 shared

• Allen Cronenberg

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., American History

  University of California, Berkeley

  1986

• B.A., American History

  Harvard University

  1981

Awards & honors

• Nancy Lyman Roelker Award (2006)
• Charles and Harriet Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award (19…
• Eby Award for the Art of Teaching (1993)
• United Methodist Scholar/Teacher of the Year (2007)
• National semi-finalist for the Robert Foster Cherry Award fo…