My research and teaching focuses on American culture and history education. My book, A More Perfect Union: Holistic Worldviews and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II, uncovers a holistic sensibility in America that both tested the logic of the Cold War and fed some of the twentieth-century’s most powerful social movements from civil rights to environmentalism to the counterculture.
Currently, I am writing a book on Montana’s care of people with disabilities from its beginnings as a state in the 1890s to the present. This study focuses on people with disabilities, state institutions, clinical and research genetics, eugenics, and the role of physicians, administrators, politicians, parents, and citizen groups in changing understandings, laws, policies and practices in the last half of the twentieth century. One pivotal figure is profiled in my article, “‘We Had to Start Treating Them as Human Beings’: Dr. Philip Pallister, Clinical Genetics and the Montana State Training School, 1940s-1970s,” published in Montana: Magazine of Western History (2017).
In the field of history education, I teach classes for our History/Social Studies education program and have been engaged in numerous public history projects and collaborative K-20 partnerships. This includes projects on the Grand Canyon, an African-American school in Virginia, a community study of Manassas National Battlefield from the 1840s to 1870s, Native American Boarding Schools, and university/school partnerships supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, U.S. Department of Education, MacArthur Foundation, and the Library of Congress. See, for example, Nature, Culture, and History at Grand Canyon.
I gained my B.A. in English and M.A. in History from Montana State University and my doctorate in American History from the University of Maryland, College Park.