Nathan Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, where he occupies the Herbert Baxter Adams chair and directs the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship.
Prof. Connolly’s 2014 book, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, received awards from the Urban History Association, the Southern Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians. He has also helped build digital archives through his three-year co-hosting of the US History podcast, BackStory, which enjoyed over 6 million downloads its final year and entered the Library of Congress American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Prof. Connolly co-founded, too, Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. The go-to source for maps of government housing discrimination in the 1930s, this site now stands as part of the Library of Congress, through its Manuscript Division Web Archive. A frequent contributor to public debates on historical and current events, Connolly’s editorials and review essays have appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Dissent, Public Books, and elsewhere.
He’s presently advancing two book projects. Stranger Still: Segregating the American Past explores how professional historians developed methods and established new academic subfields as a response to the politics of Jim Crow and desegregation. The other book, Four Daughters: An America Story, offers a synthetic treatment of the United States from a single family’s transnational vantage point. Across more than a century of history beginning in the 1880s, the Four Daughters explores the lingering effects of colonial-era strategies of racialized survival, practices of gendered self-presentation, and lost wealth under an evolving capitalism. Today’s talk, “A Touch of the Mania: Family Dispatches from a Demented Archive,” grew from that research.