Thomas J. Sugrue

Historian of cities, race, and politics in the modern United States. Detroit-set The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996), winner of the Bancroft Prize in 1998 and a mainstay of graduate and undergraduate reading lists, is unmatched as a history of the fierce inter-racial struggles over employment, politics, and neighborhood and housing in a post-World War II city. In Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008), a wide-ranging history of civil rights struggles, he expanded his canvas to map a history of continuous local struggles that had lain in the shadow of the more famous civil rights struggles in the American South. Work combines detailed research, analytical rigor, and great historical sweep. Active public intellectual, with a new book on Obama and the politics of race, as well as a very active figure in the historical profession.