2012 Spring Programming

Lecture: Kevin M. Kruse
May 12, 2012

Lecture: Kevin M. Kruse
Sat, May 12, 11am–12pm

A recording of this talk is available in our virtual Resource Room.

Kevin M. Kruse, Princeton University associate professor and author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), speaks on race and public space in Atlanta. Presented in partnership with Possible Futures.

Atlanta has seen renewed interest in temporary public art in recent years, including Art on the Beltline, Flux Projects, Living Walls, Elevate, and Edge/Public. These projects enliven our public spaces with a focus toward building or re-building community. Kruse will discuss the lingering roots of fracture in our community dating to the early 1960s period of desegregation when Atlanta’s intown neighborhoods were transformed in a few short years. The talk is targeted to artists and others interested in the history of the public spaces that we have inherited.

Kruse studies the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America, with particular interest in the making of modern conservatism. Focused on conflicts over race, rights, and religion, he also studies the postwar South and modern suburbia. His first book, White Flight, won the 2007 Francis B. Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association (for the best first book in Southern history, 2005-2006) and the 2007 Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association. Kruse is also the co-editor of three collections: The New Suburban History (2006), with Thomas Sugrue; Spaces of the Modern City (2008), with Gyan Prakash; and Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (2012) with Stephen Tuck. He is currently at work on a study of the making of the American religious nationalism in the mid-twentieth century, One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity and the Rise of the Religious Right.

In addition, Professor Kruse has been honored as one of America’s top young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences by Smithsonian Magazine, and selected as one of the top young historians in the country by the History News Network.

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