This year’s commencement speaker is world-renowned New York City historian Kenneth T. Jackson.
Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences and director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University, specializes in urban, social and military history. He is president emeritus of the New-York Historical Society. Jackson edited “The Encyclopedia of New York City” (1995) and “The Almanac of New York City” (2008) and is co-author of the newly released second edition of “The Encyclopedia of New York City” (Dec. 2010). His best-known work is “Crabgrass Frontier” (1985), a milestone study of American suburbanization.
A graduate of the University of Memphis (B.A., magna cum laude, 1961) and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1963; Ph.D., 1966), Kenneth T. Jackson 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.
Jackson has served as president of the Urban History Association (1994-1995), the Society of American Historians (1998-2000), and the Organization of American Historians (2000-2001). He has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany and Australia and a visiting professor at Dartmouth, Princeton, UCLA, and 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, Jackson is the general editor of “The Columbia History of Urban Life,” 20 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. With Camilo J. Vergara, he is the co-author 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 urban history book published in the previous quarter century. By 2001, it had been reprinted five times in hardback and 16 times in paperback.
Jackson is no stranger to Grymes Hill. In 2008, for Wagner College's 125th anniversary Founders Day program, Jackson delivered the annual Kaufman-Repage Lecture, speaking on the topic of “The Empire City: New York and Staten Island through the Centuries.”
Ken Jackson is commencement speaker
April 11, 2011
Text Size
