N. D. B. Connolly
Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History

Biography:

On Sabbatical for the 2017-2018 Academic Year
I write about racism, capitalism, politics, and the built environment in the twentieth century. My work pays special attention to people’s overlapping understandings of property rights and civil rights in the United States and the wider Americas.
I'm advancing, at present, two new book-length projects. The first is Four Daughters: An America Story. This collective biography covers four generations of a single family, following the lives of four women of color whose forbearers migrated from the Caribbean to the United States by way of Britain between the 1930s and 1990s. A genuinely Atlantic history, Four Daughters explores how immigrants of color and their children defined success in America during and after second-wave feminism, the civil rights movement, "right to work" politics, and the War on Drugs. My other book project expands on the intimate scale of Four Daughters to assess and synthesize broader trends, patterns, and processes. Black Capitalism: The "Negro Problem" and the American Economy offers the first sweeping account of how black economic success shaped the way Americans and immigrants understood the possibilities offered by capitalism in the United States.
My first book was A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (University of Chicago Press, 2014). It received, among other awards, the 2014 Kenneth T. Jackson Book Award from the Urban History Association, the 2015 Liberty Legacy Foundation Book Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the 2016 Bennett H. Wall Book Award from the Southern Historical Association. The book resuscitates older discussions of racism's profitability by treating Jim Crow segregation in Greater Miami as a variation on the colonial and postcolonial practices afflicting tropical populations around the world. A World More Concrete also highlights never-before-seen conflicts between tenants, urban landlords, homeowners, politicians, and property managers over how best to profit from Native Americans, Caribbean migrants, working-class whites, and the black poor.
Apart from publishing in scholarly venues, I contribute frequently to public debates, including regular contributions on WGBH Boston’s Here & Now, commentary for the New York Times, and as a co-host on the weekly podcast BackStory. In June 2016, Prof. Keisha N. Blain and I organized a crowd-sourced syllabus, Trump Syllabus 2.0, that locates the political ascendancy of Donald J. Trump in historical context.

Teaching:

Graduate Seminars

• Racial Literacy for Historians
• Lives of the Black Freedom Struggle
• American Metropolitan History
• The Power of Place, with Prof. Mary Ryan
• Reading Land and History
• Writing Analytic History (abbreviated summer seminar)

Undergraduate Courses

• Blacks in America: The Twentieth Century
• America after the Civil Rights Movement
• Jim Crow in America
• The U.S. City in the Twentieth Century

Publications:

“Black and Woke in Capitalist America: Revisiting Robert Allen’s Black Awakening…for New Times’ Sake,” Items, March 7, 2017.
“Black History Month: A Political Season,” BackStory blog, March 7, 2017.
“This, Our Second Nadir,” Boston Review, Forum on Race, Capitalism and Justice (Jan. 2017): 95-104.
“Trump Syllabus 2.0,” with Keisha Blain, Public Books, June 28, 2016.
“A Black Power Method,” Public Books, June 15, 2016.
“What Obama Can’t Say: A Review of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, by Michael Eric Dyson,”New York Times Sunday Book Review, Feb. 7, 2016, BR20.
“Franklin Roosevelt: A Candidate of Questionable Constitution,” Talking Points Memo, “Primary Source,” October 14, 2015.
“How Did African Americans Discover They Were Being ‘Redlined’?”Talking Points Memo, “Primary Source,” August 9, 2015.
“Skin Trouble,” Talking Points Memo, “Primary Source,” July 6, 2015.
“What Obama Can’t Say: A Review of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, by Michael Eric Dyson,”New York Times Sunday Book Review, Feb. 7, 2016, BR20.
“Notes on a Desegregated Method: Learning from Michael Katz and Others,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 4 (July 2015): 584-591.
“Black Appointees, Political Legitimacy, and the American Presidency,” in Recapturing the Oval Office, Brian Balogh and Bruce Schulman, eds. (Cornell University Press, 2015), 123-142.
“Games of Chance: Jim Crow’s Entrepreneurs Bet on ‘Negro’ Law-and-Order,” in What’s Good for Business: Business and Politics Since World War II, Julian E. Zelizer and Kimberly Phillips-Fein, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2012), 140-156.
“Sunbelt Civil Rights: Urban Renewal and the Follies of Desegregation in Greater Miami,” in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place and Region in the American South and Southwest, Darren Dochuk and Michelle Nickerson, eds. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 164-187.
“Timely Innovations: Planes, Trains, and the ‘Whites Only’ Economy of a Pan American City,” Urban History 36, no. 2, Special Issue on Transnational Urbanism in the Americas (August 2009): 243-261.
“Colored, Caribbean, and Condemned: Miami’s Overtown District and the Cultural Expense of Progress, 1940-1970,” Caribbean Studies 34, no. 1 (January-June 2006): 3-60.

Books:  

• A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida
• 2014 , University of Chicago Press
• Role: Author