I am the author of three historical monographs that variously examine the structures and fissures of U.S. political and intellectual culture. My first book, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), which was based on a dissertation I completed at the George Washington University under the tutelage of the late, great historian Leo P. Ribuffo, explores how Americans variously experienced the crisis of the Cold War as a crisis in education. While Education and the Cold War attends to the power of the Cold War consensus which has long shaped American educational thought and practice, it also analyzes the latent fractures in American political culture in the form of the conservative backlash against the modernizing project of progressive education. I explore these fractures more at length in my second book, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2015, 2nd edition 2019).

A War for the Soul of America, my second monograph, is the first book-length history of the culture wars. It has been reviewed over 50 times in venues ranging from The Wall Street Journal to The New Republic. I argue that the culture wars were the very public face of America’s struggle over the unprecedented social changes that were set off by the liberation movements of the 1960s, as the cluster of social norms that had long governed American life began to give way to a new openness

to different ideas, identities, and articulations of what it meant to be an American. A second edition was issued in 2019 with a new, extended conclusion dealing with Donald Trump.​