Daniel Czitrom

Professor of History

Specialization
American cultural and political history; history of New York City; American media history

Daniel Czitrom writes and teaches about American cultural and political history since the Civil War. He has published extensively on the history of American mass media and popular culture, as well as the history of New York City. Czitrom was awarded a 2005-6 Faculty Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support research on his current project, New York Exposed: How A Gilded Age Police Scandal Shocked the Nation and Launched the Progressive Era, to be published by Oxford in 2013.The book examines the origins, revelations, and legacies of the explosive 1894 Lexow Committee inquiry into the New York Police Department. This sensational investigation revealed how the struggle to control the city’s underworld shaped both metropolitan politics and New York’s increasingly uneasy relationship to the nation. The story illuminates a cluster of related themes: the persistent anti-urbanism in American culture; the intersection of evangelical religion and political reform; the bi-partisan nature of machine politics; the genesis of muckraking and Progressivism; and the origins of the welfare state.

In 2008, the New Press published Czitrom’s Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn of the Century New York (with Bonnie Yochelson). Supported by a Collaborative Research Grant from National Endowment for the Humanities, the book offers the first in-depth study of Riis's pioneering documentary photography, as well as a critical reevaluation Riis's career as a social reformer and journalist. It received wide-ranging coverage from the national press, as well as a feature story by Robert Siegel that aired on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. “Czitrom, a distinguished historian of old New York and a fine writer,” wrote critic Philip Lopate in the Los Angeles Times, “does an excellent job of situating Riis in the larger context of tenement housing reform, a movement that had begun long before Riis arrived and had frustrated many noble reformers…He is scrupulous in balancing Riis’s idealistic and opportunistic tendencies.” Sam Roberts in the New York Times praised the book as, “An evocative reminder both of one unrelenting individual’s ability to make a difference and of the relevance of his revelations to the painfully familiar problems we face today.”

Czitrom's first book Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (North Carolina, 1982) received the First Books Award from the American Historical Association and has been translated into Chinese twice (Beijing and Taiwan) and Spanish. In 2008, to mark the book’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication published a special symposium assessing its long range impact on media studies and media history. Czitrom is also co-author of Out of Many: A History of the American People (7th ed., Pearson Prentice Hall, 2011), one of the best selling college textbooks for U.S. history. He has been an active participant in the “Texas textbook wars,” opposing the organized campaign mounted by extreme right-wing conservatives to “revise” the writing and teaching of American history. In spring 2010 Czitrom was interviewed on this topic by CNN’s Ali Velshi, and his follow-up op-ed piece on CNN’s website, criticizing the Texas school board, attracted hundreds of responses from all over the nation.

Czitrom has co-authored two historical dramas, both based on his published writing, with the Sarasota-based playwright Jack Gilhooley. In April 2011 their play Triangle will be produced in an Actors Equity Showcase by 59 E. 59 Theaters, a major Off-Broadway venue. Set in turn-of- the- century New York, the play focuses on the tumultuous love affair between the legendary political boss “Big Tim” Sullivan, roguish and colorful “King of the Bowery,” and the beautiful actress, reformer, and Mount Holyoke alum, Margaret Holland. After years of an adulterous affair that produced a daughter, the notorious Tammany Hall power broker and the Seven Sisters’ graduate find themselves inextricably bound by the horrible Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. The tragedy claims the lives of 146 victims, mostly Jewish and Italian women and children. In its bitter aftermath, Sullivan and Holland fight to end the horrors of sweatshop labor, even as he is losing his mind to the ravages of syphilis. An earlier version of the play, Big Tim and Fanny, had its world premiere in a 1992 production mounted by the MHC Theatre Arts department.

In 2003, Red Bessie was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world. Red Bessie explores the arc of American radicalism from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the McCarthyite repression of the 1950s. The play receiving glowing reviews from critics and an enthusiastic response from audiences. The Times Literary Supplement described Red Bessie as "clearheaded and humane, and more fun than might be expected of such a high-minded project."

In 2005 Czitrom was elected to the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). He has also been named an OAH Distinguished Lecturer for 2006-2011. In addition, Czitrom serves on the Executive Committee of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), housed at New York University’s Tamiment Library, representing the world’s largest collection of historical sources documenting the American involvement with the Spanish Civil War.

Born and raised in the Bronx, Czitrom has served as featured on-camera commentator and historical adviser for several recent historical documentaries, including New York, the seven-episode PBS series, directed by Ric Burns and broadcast in 1999 and 2002. His appearances in other film projects include American Photography: A Century of Images (PBS, 1999), Slumming It: Myth and Culture on the Bowery (PBS, 2003), The Great Transatlantic Cable (PBS, 2005), Currier & Ives: Images of America (PBS, 2007), and Jack the Ripper in America (Discovery Channel, 2009).

At Mount Holyoke, Czitrom regularly teaches ‘We Didn't Start the Fire’: The United States Since 1945; Reading the New York Times: Journalism, Power, History; New York City: Capitol of the Twentieth Century; and Reel America: History and Film, among other courses.

News Links