Biography

I am a historian of the twentieth century United States. My work focuses on how organized interest groups and everyday Americans influence government policy and the terms of political debate. My current research focuses on the rise of whistleblowing as a form of regulation, a labor right, a mechanism for bureaucratic accountability, a way to save money, and a very contested expression of idealized citizenship.

Along with Katherine Turk, I am currently working on SILKWOOD, a political biography of nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood. We focus on the civil case brought by her estate, Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee—a case that began in Oklahoma City but ended up before the Supreme Court in a decision that vindicated the right of employees to sue the nuclear industry in state courts. SILKWOOD shows how the social forces of the 1970s—feminism, environmentalism, civil libertarianism, organized labor—produced a nuclear martyr, and trial of the century.

My first book, The Cigarette: A Political History is a history of tobacco in the twentieth century that places farmers, government officials, and citizen-activists at the center of the story. Rather than focusing exclusively on "Big Tobacco," I argue that  domestic and global cigarette consumption rose through the efforts of organized tobacco farmers and US government officials; and that it fell as a result of local government action spurred by the efforts of citizen-activists and activist lawyers. The Cigarette won the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Society for Southern Women Historians for the best book in Southern History and the PROSE Award for North American History from the Association of American Publishers. It was a finalist for the LA Times Book prize and one of Smithsonian Magazine's "Best History Titles of 2019."