Daniel Czitrom

Daniel Czitrom is Emeritus Professor of History on the Ford Foundation at Mount Holyoke College, where he taught American cultural and political history for 41 years. Born and raised in The Bronx, New York, he graduated from Bronx High School of Science and SUNY at Binghamton, and he received his PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Czitrom’s latest book is a historical memoir, Kitchen Table History: Contending With My Family’s Radical Past (University of Illinois Press, January 2027). The book examines three generations of his family and the events and movements that shaped them. These include the flight from murderous anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine and migration from Hungary to new lives in New York City; union organizing in the violent world of the 1920s garment industry; three relatives who volunteered to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War (two of whom never returned); anti-fascist activism and working class Communist commitment at home; and three plus decades of FBI harassment and surveillance. Although writing in the first person, Czitrom includes original historical research in every chapter—archives, newspaper accounts, letters, memoirs, photographs, and travel to Ukraine, Hungary, and Spain—digging into various family members' lives. The chapters focused on his life include growing up in the Bronx, involvement with SDS and the anti-Vietnam War movement, political and union activism in grad school and after, and his struggle to become a professional historian.

The book asks, what can kitchen table stories—and silences—tell us about both individuals and the causes they embraced? What is the relationship between memory and historical truth? What elements of my family’s radical past are worth preserving and which need to be abandoned? And can the intimate scale of family biography reveal dimensions of political and social history that more conventional approaches miss? Advance praise for Kitchen Table History comes from writer Adam Hochschild, “As a historian, Daniel Czitrom knows that history is composed of social and economic forces, and he has spent much of his career chronicling them. But as a human being, he knows that it is also composed of the people who love you and nurture you. I found his exploration of his own family’s story fascinating, wise, and clear-eyed. He sees both their sense of justice and their illusions but never loses his own hopes for a radically more equal world.” And film maker and novelist John Sayles writes: “Propelled by the lore of his own family, Dan Czitrom undertakes a series of journeys, searching for records, connections, forgotten lives, attempting to better understand the long and tangled history of ‘the left’ as it traveled to and developed in America. Kitchen Table History is a saga of hope, disappointments, and an abiding faith in the possibility of a better world.

Czitrom’s previous book New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal That Launched the Progressive Era (Oxford, 2016; pb, 2018). It tells the story of how a minister’s moral crusade to clean up New York City in the 1890s morphed into the first sensational political investigation of the modern era and kick-started the Progressive movement. The narrative unfolds within the larger contexts of national politics, police violence, poverty, patronage, vote fraud and vote suppression. Mike Wallace, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History for Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, described the book as “a walk on the seamy side of Gotham in the 1890s, peopled with brutal cops, corrupt politicians, conniving businessmen, evangelical zealots, exploited immigrants, earnest reformers, and sensational media…A tour-de-force of investigation and interpretation.” Novelist Kevin Baker said of New York Exposed, “Careful and rigorous history, it nonetheless reads like a gripping police procedural filled with some of the most colorful and outrageous characters of our past.”

Czitrom's Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn of the Century New York (with Bonnie Yochelson, New Press, 2008; University of Chicago Press pb. 2014) offers a fresh look at the Progressive era social reformer, journalist, and pioneer photographer who publicized the conditions of the desperately poor in New York. The book received wide attention, including reviews in the NY Times, LA Times, and Chicago Tribune, and it was the focus of a special feature by Robert Siegel on National Public Radio's All Things Considered (June 30, 2008). Sam Roberts in the New York Times praised it 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 is also the author of Media and the American Minds: From Morse to McLuhan (University of North Carolina Press, 1982), which received the First Books Award from the American Historical Association and has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Korean. He is co-author of Out of Many: A History of the American People (Pearson, 9th ed., 2019), a bestselling U.S. History college textbook. 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.

Czitrom has been deeply engaged with bringing history to wider audiences beyond the academy. From 2011-2013, he served as the historical advisor for Copper, an original dramatic series set in Civil War-era New York City and broadcast over BBC America. He worked closely with executive producers Tom Fontana, Will Rokos, and Christina Wayne, as well as series writers, and in 2013 he wrote a historical blog for BBC America keyed to each of Copper's episodes. Czitrom has appeared as a featured on-camera commentator for numerous documentary film projects, including Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip (PBS/American Masters, 2020); Joseph Pulitzer: Voices of the People (PBS/American Masters, 2019); The Rise and Fall of Penn Station (PBS/American Experience 2014); The Great Transatlantic Cable (PBS/American Experience, 2005); New York: A Documentary Film (PBS, 1999), and American Photography: A Century of Images (PBS, 1999).

Czitrom has also co-authored (with Jack Gilhooley) two original historical dramas. Triangle, set amidst the terrible tragedy of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, received an Equity Showcase Production as part of the “Americas Off Broadway Festival”, at 59 E. 59 Theaters, New York, April 15-May 1, 2011. An earlier version of the play, Big Tim and Fanny, had its premiere in a 1992 production mounted by the MHC Theatre Arts department. Red Bessie, a historical drama with songs, was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003. It explores the arc of American radicalism from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the McCarthyite repression of the 1950s. 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 2012, Czitrom was elected to the Society of American Historians. Based at Columbia University, the Society promotes literary distinction in historical writing. He is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians (OAH).