Faculty Club
Biography
Robert Self is Mary Ann Lippitt Professor of American History and Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence. A historian of modern American history, Self is the author of All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s, a history of a half-century of gender and sexual politics in the United States, and American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, an award-winning study of metropolitan politics featuring the simultaneous rise of the tax revolt and black power in post-World War II California. A former Guggenheim and Burkhardt Fellow, Self is now at work on a book entitled The Best Years of Our Lives: Houses, Cars, Children, and American Consumer Economics in the Twentieth Century, about the emergence, rise, and decline, over a century, of a nuclear-family-centered economic order.
Houses, cars, and children shape modern lives, urban landscapes, and family debt. Emotionally, they structure rituals of aging and consumer desire. Economically, they are both assets and liabilities, and for more than a century they have represented the largest investments ordinary people make over the course of their lifetime. Together, over that century in the United States, houses, cars, and children have organized the family economy and driven the national economy—they are the pivot points where family economics meets political economy. What, then, is the deeper history of that relationship? How did a particular combination of houses, cars, and children, what we might call the “hydrocarbon nuclear family,” become so central to American life in the twentieth century? This is the subject of Professor Self’s current research. In his talk, Self will both sketch the broad contours of this project and provide a deeper dive into one of its themes.