Dr. Jeffrey McClurken Featured on C-Span

In a recent C-Span interview, Professor of History Jeff McClurken discusses the difficulties families faced  after the United States Civil War as their loved ones returned from the conflict.  McClurken, author of Take Care of the Living: Reconstruction of Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia, explores the consequences of the war for more than 3,000 Confederate soldiers and their families in Virginia. See the video above for more.

New Book by Dr. Steven Harris: “Communism on Tomorrow Street”

The History and American Studies Department is happy to announce that Dr. Steven Harris’ book, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin, was recently published by the Woodrow Wilson Center Press and the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Book description:

This book examines how, beginning under Khrushchev in 1953, a generation of Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded communal dwellings of the Stalin era to modern single-family apartments, later dubbed khrushchevka. Arguing that moving to a separate apartment allowed ordinary urban dwellers to experience Khrushchev’s thaw, Steven E. Harris fundamentally shifts interpretation of the thaw, conventionally understood as an elite phenomenon.

Harris focuses on the many participants eager to benefit from and influence the new way of life embodied by the khrushchevka, its furniture, and its associated consumer goods. He examines activities of national and local politicians, planners, enterprise managers, workers, furniture designers and architects, elite organizations (centrally involved in creating cooperative housing), and ordinary urban dwellers. Communism on Tomorrow Street also demonstrates the relationship of Soviet mass housing and urban planning to international efforts at resolving the “housing question” that had been studied since the nineteenth century and led to housing developments in Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America as well as the USSR.