Matthew Frye Jacobson on Why I Became a Historian
Randall Stephens Matthew Frye Jacobson, interviewed in the video posted here, is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University . He is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association . He's also the author of What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard University Press, 2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (University of California Press, 1995). Jacobson was one of the keynote speakers at the Nordic Association for American Studies conference I attended this...