Jerald Podair is Professor of History and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies Emeritus at Lawrence University, where he has taught for twenty-five years. He is the author, co-author, or editor of seven books, including The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis; Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer; and The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States. He is the recipient of the Allan Nevins Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians for "literary distinction in the writing of history," and an elected Fellow of the New York Academy of History.