Drop-in Hours: by appointment only

Landon Storrs specializes in twentieth-century U.S. social and political history, particularly in the history of women, social movements, and social policy. Her current research examines the work of the U.S. social scientist Caroline Ware on international programs for community development and for women’s empowerment, primarily in Latin America, during the post-1945 decades.

Caroline Ware was one of the protagonists of Storrs's 2012 book, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton University Press, 2012). Using newly declassified government records, Second Red Scare showed that the federal employee loyalty program—created in the 1940s in response to fears that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government—rigidly constrained policymaking in fields including public assistance, national health insurance, labor and consumer protection, civil rights, and international aid. The loyalty program not only destroyed or redirected the careers of many noncommunist officials, it prohibited discussion of social democratic policy ideas in government circles—narrowing the scope of American political discourse to this day. The book also documented the antifeminism of the Old Right, showing how conservatives exploited popular hostility to female government officials in order to discredit left-liberal policies.

Storrs’s first book, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) analyzed female reformers' campaign for state and national wage-hour laws during the Great Depression, when industry migration toward low-cost labor in the U.S. South was driving down wages nationwide.

Storrs came to the University of Iowa in 2012 from the University of Houston. She earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994 and a BA from Yale in 1983.

Teaching

Landon Storrs teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of women, politics, and social movements. At Iowa, these courses include:

• HIST:1262  American History 1877 to Present
• HIST:2151  Introduction to the History Major -- The U.S. Women's Movement, 1960-1990
• HIST:3282  Women and Power in U.S. History Since Civil War
• HIST:4260  The Sixties in America
• HIST:7241  Readings: U.S. Social Policy
• HIST:7275  Readings: History of Women and Gender in the United States
• HIST:7287  Seminar: History of Women and Gender

Awards and service

• Chair, Department of History, University of Iowa (2018-2022)
• Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians (2016-)
• CLAS Collegiate Teaching Award (2016)
• Internal Funding Initiatives Review Committee, UI Office of the Vice President for Research (2014-2016)
• Ellis Hawley Book Prize Committee, Organization of American Historians (2014-15)
• Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships Committee (2013-14)
• American Council of Learned Societies Fellow (2006-07)
• Harry S. Truman Library Institute Scholar’s Award (2006-07, declined)
• James Madison article prize, Society for History in the Federal Government 2004 (for “Red Scare Politics,” Journal of American History Sept. 2003)

Publications

Books

• The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton University Press, 2012)
• Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000)

Articles

• "Rage against the Administrative State"
• “McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare”
• “Laying the Foundations for the Post-World War II Red Scare: Investigating the Left-Feminist Consumer Movement”
• “Revisiting Truman’s Federal Employee Loyalty Program”
• "Attacking the 'Washington Femmocracy': Antifeminism in the Cold War Campaign against 'Communists in Government'"
• “Left-Feminism, the Consumer Movement, and Red Scare Politics in the United States, 1935-1960”
• “Red Scare Politics and the Suppression of Popular Front Feminism: The Loyalty Investigation of Mary Dublin Keyserling”
• “Gender and the Development of the Regulatory State: The Controversy over Restricting Women's Night Work in the Depression-Era South”

Commentary and popular writing

• "What McCarthyism Can Teach Us about Trumpism"
• "The Ugly History Behind Trump's Attacks on Civil Servants"
• “Bill de Blasio Is Not Afraid of Red Scare Ghosts”