Colin Gordon
Drop-in Hours: by appointment only
Colin Gordon writes on the history of American public policy and political economy. He is the author of Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023), Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2003), and New Deals: Business, Labor and Politics, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
He has written for the Nation, In these Times, Jacobin, and Dissent (where he is a regular contributor). His digital projects include online companions to Patchwork Apartheid, Citizen Brown, Mapping Decline; the data-visualization project Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013); and public history on the history of racial segregation in Iowa counties, and in St. Louis.
His recent research support includes a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2021-22), a visiting scholar fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation (2022-23), and (with co-PI Ashley Howard) a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Grant (2023-26). He is a senior research consultant at Common Good Iowa for which he has written or co-written reports on health coverage, economic development, and wages and working conditions (including the biennial State of Working Iowa series).
Professor Gordon is the recipient of an F. Wendell Miller Professorship (2016), the University of Iowa Regents Award for Faculty Excellence (2016), the University of Iowa Award for Distinguished Achievement in Publicly Engaged Research (2015), and the College of Liberal Arts and Science Collegiate Fellowship (2014).
Teaching
Courses recently taught by Professor Gordon include:
- HIST:1219 Big Ideas: Equality, Opportunity, and Public Policy in America
- HIST:1262 American History 1877-Present
- HIST:2151 Introduction to the History Major – Iowa History
- HIST:2195 Digital History Workshop
- HIST:3232 History of American Inequality
- HIST:4264 USA in a World at War 1931-1945
- HIST:4266 The New Era and the New Deal 1920-1940
- HIST:6001 First Year Graduate Colloquium
- HIST:7192 Pre-Dissertation Writing Seminar
- HIST:7241 Readings in U.S. Social Policy
- HIST:7263 Readings in Contemporary United States
Awards and service
- Chair, Department of History, University of Iowa, 2006-2011, 2023-present
- Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Grant, 2023-26
- Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar, 2022-23
- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2021-22
- F. Wendell Miller Professor of History, July 2016
- University of Iowa Regents Award for Faculty Excellence, May 2016
- Major Research Grant, UI Internal Funding Initiative, September 2015
- Distinguished Achievement in Publicly-Engaged Research Award, University of Iowa, 2015
- CLAS Collegiate Fellow, 2014
- May Brodbeck Fellowship, 2007-08
- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2004-05
- Arts and Humanities Initiative Grant, University of Iowa, 2002-03
- Obermann Center Interdisciplinary Research Grant, Summer 2002
- Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History, University of Iowa, 2000-04
- Faculty Scholar Award, University of Iowa, 1998-2000
- Central Investment Fund for Research Enhancement Grant, 1997
Publications
Books
- Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality
- Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs
- Major Problems in American History, 1920-1945
- Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City
- Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth Century America
- New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935
Articles
- "Federalism and Class Struggle"
- "The Logic of Capitalist Accumulation Explains Neoliberalism"
- “Risky Business: Health Care Before and After Trump" IN Political Power and Social Theory vol. 39
- "States of welfare: decentralization and its consequences in US social policy" IN Handbook on Urban Social Policies
- Zoned Out: Creve Coeur, Malcolm Terrace, and the Struggle for Affordable Housing in the St. Louis Suburbs
- "Dividing the City: Race-Restrictive Covenants and the Architecture of Segregation in St. Louis"
- “Our Segregated Century"
- "Who Gets Protected?"
- “Home Inequity: Race, Wealth and Housing in St. Louis”
- "American Inequality: A Primer" IN Inequality in America: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
- “Making Ferguson: Segregation and Uneven Development in St. Louis and St. Louis County” in Ferguson’s Fault Lines: The Race Quake that Rocked a Nation
- "Patchwork Metropolis: Fragmented Governance and Urban Decline in Greater St. Louis"
- "St. Louis Blues: The Urban Crisis in the Gateway City"
- Lost in Space, or Confessions of an Accidental Geographer
- "Blighting the Way: Urban Renewal, Economic Development, and the Elusive Definition of 'Blight'"
- "A Poisonous Past"
- "The Lost City of Solidarity: Metropolitan Unionism in Historical Perspective"
- "Why No Corporatism in the United States?: Business Disorganization and its Consequences"
- "Why No National Health Insurance in the U.S.? The Limits of Social Provision in War and Peace, 1941–1948"
- "Does the Ruling Class Rule?"
- "Still Searching for Progressivism"
- "Lessons of History? Past and Present in the Gulf War"
- "Dead on Arrival: health care reform in the United States"
- "New Deal, Old Deck: Business and the Origins of Social Security, 1920-1935"
- "Crafting a Usable Past: Consensus, Ideology, and Historians of the American Revolution"
- "The Modern American Presidency, 1945–1974: A Bibliographical Essay"
Commentary and Popular Writing
- "The suburban voter strategy isn’t as black and white as it used to be"
- "The Structural Crisis of the New Deal Order Gave Us Neoliberalism"
- "Who Segregated America?"
- "From Hard Hats to Scrubs: The Postwar Political Economy and Its Shifting Patterns of Inequality”
- "Amazon Doesn’t Know How to Innovate. It Knows How to Exploit"
- "The Pandemic Risk Shift"
- "Federalism is Killing Us"
- “Astonishingly callous blow to jobless Iowans”
- "We Don’t Have to Keep Shoveling Money to Big Ag"
- "Closing Doors: Race and Opportunity in St. Louis Schools"
- "Meatpacking Bosses in Iowa Allegedly Organized a Betting Pool on How Many Workers Would Get COVID"
- "Without Another Massive Federal Stimulus, State and Local Governments Will Face Brutal Austerity"
- "Still Separate, Still Unequal"
- "Bernie Sanders Would Make a Very Good Secretary of Labor"
- "Labor Day 2020: COVID-19 Economic, Health Crisis Exposes Iowa Weaknesses"
- "Beyond jobless rate drop: Little for optimism"
- "Comparing the US and Canada Shows Just How Badly America Has Bungled the Pandemic"
- "The Pre-Emption Racket"
- "Warning: Edge of a cliff"
- "What should Iowa's recovery look like?"
- "An Uprising Reader"
- "The Coronavirus Wouldn’t Be Decimating Meatpacking Plants If Company Bosses Hadn’t Busted the Unions"
- "Iowa Governor: Your Job or Your Life"
- "COVID-19 and the Color Line"
- "Understanding the Unemployment Crisis"
- "Demanding a healthy way to go back to work"
- "We Need Massive Aid to the States — Not a Round of Bankruptcies"
- "COVID-19 Is Exposing the United States’ Ragged, Shameful Safety Net"
- "Weak labor protections have put Midwestern food processing workers at risk for coronavirus"
- "Meatpacking outbreak is unsurprising when you consider how poorly Iowa treats such workers"
- "The Unemployment Shock"
- "Corona: The Inequality Virus"
- "Inequality in the Trump Era"
- "Race in the Heartland: Equity, Opportunity, and Public Policy in the Midwest"
- What’s (Still) the Matter with Iowa
- “Healthy Signs”
- "Wage Woes"
- "Deeds of Mistrust, History Happens Here"
- "Ferguson Digs in its Heels"
- "Ferguson, One Year Later"
- "Declining Cities, Declining Unions: Urban Sprawl and US Inequality"
- "The Bare Minimum: Labor Standards and American Inequality"
- "The Perils of Private Welfare: Job-Based Benefits and American Inequality"
- "The Union Difference: Labor and American Inequality"
- "Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality"
- "Revenue Blues: The Case for Higher Taxes"
- "The Lost City of Solidarity"
- "What’s So Bold about $9.00 an Hour? Benchmarking the Minimum Wage"
- "The State of Working Iowa"
- "The Manufacturing Jobs Score, 1949-2011"
- "Wage Theft in Iowa"
- "Do America's Corporations Care how Much American Workers Earn?"
- "Fending for Themselves Nonstandard Workers, Health Insurance Coverage and the Labor Market"
- "Not Your Father‘s Health Insurance Discount Medical Plans and the Health Care Crisis"
- "The New Deal Succeeded When FDR Invested In U.S."
- 20th Century U.S. history
- American Public Policy
- American Political Economy
- American Urban History
