Kenneth T. Jackson

Kenneth T. Jackson is the director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History and the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University. He graduated from the University of Memphis (B.A., magna cum laude, 1961) and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1963; Ph.D., 1966). He has served as president of the Urban History Association, the Society of American Historians, the Organization of American Historians, and the New-York Historical Society. Professor Jackson also serves as a trustee on various boards of museums and preservation and historical societies and associations. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges, universities, civic groups, and historical societies around the world, and has participated in numerous documentaries about New York and urban history. He holds honorary degrees from four universities and has received ten prestigious awards from institutions around the country. In addition to serving on the editorial boards of several professional journals, Professor Jackson has published The Klu Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (Oxford 1967), the award-winning Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford 1985), and recently collaborated with David Dunbar to produce the comprehensive Empire City: New York Through the Centuries (Columbia 2002), among others. He is most at home riding the subways and exploring backstreets and gritty neighborhoods of New York City, where he has been leading all-night bike rides, three-hour walking tours, and all-day bus trips for decades.