Suburbia

Bringing in both new and familiar voices to consider what’s new in the field and how our collective understanding may have changed, this series explores the history of the West through a reflective and multifaceted lens.

About the Speakers:

Becky Nicolaides is the co-coordinator of the LA History & Metro Studies Group. She received her B.A. from USC in history and journalism and her Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. After serving on the faculties of Arizona State University West and the University of California, San Diego, she became an LA-based scholar and historical consultant in 2006. Her work focuses on sub/urban history and the history of Los Angeles. She is author of The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford) and My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago), and co-editor of The Suburb Reader (Routledge). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, the Pacific Historical Review, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. She is currently a lead project member of the USC Library’s “Los Angeles County Demographic Data Project 1950–2010,” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is co–principal investigator of the EU Erasmus+ transnational project “Urbanism and Suburbanization in the EU Countries and Abroad: Reflection in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts, 2022–2024.” She previously served on the governing council of the American Historical Association and as a subcommittee co-chair for Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Civic Memory Working Group.

Michelle Nickerson is associate professor at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on the history of women and gender, U.S. politics, and urban America. Nickerson’s scholarship focuses on politics and social movements from right to left. She has published two books, the monograph Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right and a volume of essays she co-edited, Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region. Nickerson’s most recent book project, Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial, examines the relationship between Catholicism and radicalism in the peace movement of the Vietnam War era in the United States. It will be published by the University of Chicago Press this coming fall.

Matt Lassiter is a scholar of the 20th-century United States with a research and teaching focus on political history, urban/suburban studies, racial and social inequality, and the history of policing and the carceral state. His most recent book, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, was published by Princeton University Press in 2023. He is on the steering committee of the Carceral State Project and is the co–principal investigator of its Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance research initiative. He is also director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab and coordinator of the Environmental Justice HistoryLab, each of which involves undergraduate student researchers in collaborative public engagement projects. He has served on the boards of the Urban History Association, Urban History, and the Journal of Policy History, and is a series editor of “Politics and Culture in Modern America,” published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

This webinar is part of the Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West’s 20th Anniversary Considering Anew Series.