Nancy MacLean

Professor of History and African American Studies
Chair, Department of History
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
PhD, U.S. History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989
nkm050@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information

Nancy MacLean specializes in the history of social movements and public policy. With expertise in African American, women’s and labor history, she has often combined her knowledge from those areas to develop new approaches to longstanding historical debates.

Her most recent book, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace,
(Harvard University Press, 2006) reveals how central the quest for better jobs was to all the modern movements for equality: the black freedom movement, the women’s movement, and the Mexican American civil rights movement. It concludes that creating more good jobs for all Americans is vital to fulfill the vision of human rights for which these movements labored.

Her first book, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford University Press, 1994), explored the roles of gender and whiteness in a reactionary movement. It won several awards, including the Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and The New York Times Book Review named it a “noteworthy” book of the year.

MacLean co-chairs the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies, a consortium of faculty from Chicago area campuses who work with labor and community organizations to build public dialogue on class issues. She also serves as senior history adviser to Creating a Community of Scholars, a three-year project in partnership with Evanston Township High School and the Minority Student Achievement Network, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, to improve history learning among secondary school students.

Current Research

The Modern Women’s Movement: A Brief History with Documents. MacLean is producing a short interpretive study of “second-wave” feminism, along with a collection of primary sources, that will emphasize the movement’s impact on public policy. The book will be published by Bedford/St. Martin’s in 2007.

Debating the Conservative Movement, 1945 to the Present. How did a political fringe become the mainstream? This book will offer students a chance to explore questions and reach their own views of how a small band of conservatives in the immediate aftermath of World War II launched a revolution that shifted American politics to the right, challenged the New Deal order, transformed the Republican party into a voice of conservatism, and set the terms of debate in American politics as the country entered the new millennium. MacLean and co-author Donald Critchlow will offer two contrasting perspectives of the history of conservatism in modern America and provide primary documents that encourage students to reach their own conclusions. It will be published by by Rowman & Littlefield in 2008.

The Origins of School Vouchers. MacLean is researching the closing of the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, from 1959-64, an outgrowth of southern segregationists’ policy of “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education. This five-year struggle also generated the first push for the tuition grants and school vouchers that later became a cause of national conservatives.

Publications

Books

MacLean, Nancy. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. Harvard University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation (2006).

MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. Oxford University Press (1994).

Selected Articles

MacLean, N. From the war on poverty to the new inequality: The fight for a living wage. Forthcoming in American Quarterly.

MacLean, N. White supremacy’s suburban political jujitsu. Forthcoming in In These Times.

MacLean, N. Southern dominance in borrowed language: The regional origins of American neo-liberalism. Forthcoming in New Landscapes of Inequality, ed. M. di Leonardo and J. Collins. Santa Fe: School of American Research.

MacLean, N. Neo-confederacy vs. the New Deal: The regional utopia of the modern American Right. Forthcoming in The End of Southern History? ed. J. Crespino and M. Lassiter.

MacLean, N. Gender and the social movements of the sixties. Forthcoming in OAH Magazine of History, special issue on “The Sixties in Perspective.”

MacLean, N. 2006. Achieving the promise of the Civil Rights Act: Herbert Hill and the NAACP’s fight for jobs and justice. Labor 3(2): 13-19.

MacLean, N. 2002. Rethinking the second wave. The Nation 275(12): 28-34.