Description: The most popular reader for the U.S. history course
Brief description: Lisa McGirr is Professor of History at Harvard University, where she specializes in the history of the twentieth-century United States. Her research and teaching interests bridge the fields of social and political history and focus on collective action, state building, reform movements, and politics. Her most recent book, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, won acclaim for excavating the significant but neglected state-building legacies of national Prohibition. Her award-winning first book, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, investigated the social and regional basis of grassroots conservative politics in the post-World War II United States. She teaches a wide variety of courses on the history of the United States in the twentieth century.