Kenneth Jackson
Affiliation
- Faculty Fellow, Department of History
Research
Jackson is the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University. A graduate of the University of Memphis (B.A., magna cum laude, 1961) and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1963; Ph.D., 1966), he served for three years as an officer in the United States Air Force before joining the Columbia faculty as an assistant professor in 1968. Promoted to associate professor in 1971, to full professor in 1976, and to the Andrew W. Mellon professorship in 1987, he assumed the Barzun professorship, which honors one of the nation's most distinguished men of letters, in 1990.
He has served as president of the Urban History Association (1994-1995), the Society of American Historians (1998-2000), and the Organization of American Historians (2000-23001). He has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany and Australian and a visiting professor at Dartmouth, Princeton, UCLA, and the George Washington University. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and historical societies around the world, and he has been a featured guest on the NBC Today Show, ABC World News Tonight, ABC Nightline, CBS Up to the Minute, CNN, The History Channel, East West Television, and more than a score of documentary productions. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Century Foundation. He has received Hunter College's Donald Sullivan Award, the University of Memphis' Distinguished Alumni Award, the St. Nicholas Society's Gold Medal of Merit, Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity's Order of the West Range, the Skyscraper Museum's Notable New Yorkers Award, and the College of Physicians and Surgeons' Distinguished Award in the Humanities.
A member of the editorial boards of several professional journals, Professor Jackson is the general editor of the Columbia History of Urban Life, twenty volumes of which had appeared by 2001. He was the editor-in-chief of the Dictionary of American Biography (1990-1995), and he is now the editor-in-chief of the Scribner's Encyclopedia of American Lives, five volumes of which had appeared by 2001. He is the co-author with Camilo J. Vergara of Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (Princeton Architectural Press, 1989). His other books include The Ku Klux Klan in the City (Oxford, 1967); Atlas of American History (Scribner's, revised edition, 1978); Cities in American History (With Stanley K. Schultz: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972); and American Vistas (with Leonard Dinnerstein), which went through seven editions between 1970 and 1998. Professor Jackson's best known publication, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford, 1985), was a selection of the History Book Club and was the subject of special sessions of the American Historical Convention in 1985, the Southern Historical Convention in 1986, and the Organization of American Historians Convention in 1998. It won both the Francis Parkman and the Bancroft Prizes, and the New York Times chose it as one of the notable books of the year. In 1994, a Journal of Urban History survey revealed that Crabgrass Frontier had been the most influential book published in urban history in the previous quarter century. By 2001, it had been reprinted five times in hardback and sixteen times in paperback.
Kenneth T. Jackson is the president and chief executive officer of the New-York Historical Society. Founded in 1804, it is the oldest cultural organization in the state of New York and the second oldest (after Massachusetts) historical society in the United States.
See Also
- Featured publication: American Vistas: Volume 2: 1877 to the Present
