Congrats on the book! But I’m a bit curious, how did you decide on your specialization ? 20th century public policy seems like a rather dull domain to fall in love with, over other “sexier” fields of history. (no offense)

Thanks very much!

My interest began when I took a seminar on policy history as an undergraduate that really inspired me, because it was the first time I was exposed to books like Theda Skcopol’s Social Policy In the United States, which presented an entirely new and different way of looking at issues like poverty, inequality, welfare, social insurance, work, the New Deal, racial discrimination, etc. that I really cared about but didn’t have the tools to explain why things were the way they were. 

I was already interested in political history even though it had fallen out of fashion during the social turn, because I knew government was a big part of the story. Normally, I guess I’d have ended up in political science, but historical theory and methodology have always appealed to me more than political science’s heavy emphasis on statistics. Also, I wasn’t as interested in studying about elections or political parties, and I knew that was a big part of poli sci. 

Policy history, because of its ties to the American Political Development school of political science, borrows a lot of theoretical tools and models from APD – path dependence, policy feedback, and other historical institutionalist concepts – while still remaining primarily a subfield of history. So studying policy history would give me the tools I needed, while still letting me do the kind of research I was interested in doing. 

All this dovetailed with my undergraduate senior thesis. I had read Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Coming of the New Deal, and I was fascinated by a very short chapter on the Civil Works Administration, and why I’d never heard anything about a program that put 4.26 million people to work in three months, which seemed an astonishing feat in comparison to contemporary politics. So I decided to write my thesis about the CWA in New York City – it helped that there are a bunch of CWA records in the Municipal Archives down on Chambers street – and in the process of writing that paper, I read a lot more policy history.

So I knew by that point that I wanted to study policy history in grad school, so I looked for the history PhD program with the largest number of policy historians in it, and the rest was…well, history.