Background
Matthew Jacobson was born on November 8, 1958, in Boulder, Colorado, the United States. He is the son of Jacob and Sarah (Frye) Jacobson.
(America’s racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkabl...)
America’s racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of “whiteness studies” and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants “race” has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were re-racialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counter-history of how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became Caucasian. Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of racial formation―race as formed in conquest, enslavement, imperialism, segregation, and labor migration―are all part of the complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race. Whiteness of a Different Color traces the fluidity of racial categories from an immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history, including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft Riots of 1863.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674951913/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(How a new American identity was forged by immigration and...)
How a new American identity was forged by immigration and expansion a century ago. In Barbarian Virtues, Matthew Frye Jacobson offers a keenly argued and persuasive history of the close relationship between immigration and America's newly expansionist ambitions at the turn of the twentieth century. Jacobson draws upon political documents, novels, travelogues, academic treatises, and art as he recasts American political life. In so doing, he shows how today's attitudes about "Americanism" -- from Border Watch to the Gulf War -- were set in this crucial period, when the dynamics of industrialization rapidly accelerated the rate at which Americans were coming in contact with foreign peoples.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809016281/?tag=2022091-20
2001
("A scholarly study of the real roots of what Jacobson cal...)
"A scholarly study of the real roots of what Jacobson calls 'America's largely assimilated but ultimately "unmeltable" ethics.' It's a startling point of view for readers who are accustomed to the self-congratulatory myth of America as a beacon of liberty to which the 'huddled masses' of the world look with longing."―Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times "A scholarly study of the real roots of what Jacobson calls 'America's largely assimilated but ultimately "unmeltable" ethics.' It's a startling point of view for readers who are accustomed to the self-congratulatory myth of America as a beacon of liberty to which the 'huddled masses' of the world look with longing."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520233425/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in w...)
In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in which white ethnic affiliations were on the wane and a common American identity was the norm. Yet by the 1970s, these white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, whites sought renewed status in the romance of Old World travails and New World fortunes. Ellis Island replaced Plymouth Rock as the touchstone of American nationalism. The entire culture embraced the myth of the indomitable white ethnics―who they were and where they had come from―in literature, film, theater, art, music, and scholarship. The language and symbols of hardworking, self-reliant, and ultimately triumphant European immigrants have exerted tremendous force on political movements and public policy debates from affirmative action to contemporary immigration. In order to understand how white primacy in American life survived the withering heat of the Civil Rights movement and multiculturalism, Matthew Frye Jacobson argues for a full exploration of the meaning of the white ethnic revival and the uneasy relationship between inclusion and exclusion that it has engendered in our conceptions of national belonging.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674027434/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(Considered by many to be the best political thriller ever...)
Considered by many to be the best political thriller ever made, The Manchurian Candidate is as entertaining, troubling, and relevant today as it was in 1962. Starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, and directed with probing insight by John Frankenheimer, the film was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. Largely out of circulation for the next two decades, it acquired a well-deserved cult following until it was rereleased during the last year of the Reagan presidency, when its pointed satire of political and media manipulation seemed more timely than ever. In What Have They Built You to Do?—a key line of dialogue from the original film—Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González undertake an ambitious reexamination of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 novel by Richard Condon on which it was based, and—critically analyzed here for the first time—the 2004 remake directed by Jonathan Demme. Based on close readings of the film and broad investigations into the eras in which it was made and rediscovered, the authors decode the many layers of meaning within and surrounding the film, from the contradictions of the Cold War it both embodies and parodies—McCarthyism and Kennedy liberalism, individualism and conformity—to its construction of Asian villains, overbearing women, and male heroes in a society anxious about race, gender, and sexuality. Through their multifaceted analysis of The Manchurian Candidate (in all its incarnations), Jacobson and González raise provocative questions about power and anxiety in American politics and society from the Cold War to today.Matthew Frye Jacobson teaches American studies at Yale University. His books include Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. Gaspar González is an independent scholar and journalist in Miami. He has taught American studies at Yale University and film studies at the University of Miami.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816641250/?tag=2022091-20
2008
Matthew Jacobson was born on November 8, 1958, in Boulder, Colorado, the United States. He is the son of Jacob and Sarah (Frye) Jacobson.
Jacobson graduated from Evergreen State College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981. He earned his doctorate at Brown University in 1992.
Jacobson started his career as an assistant professor of history at State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1992. Three years later he went to Yale University in New Haven, where he still works as the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies & History and a professor of African American Studies.
Jacobson is known as a historian, whose researches concerns race in U.S. political culture, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.
Matthew is the author of What Have they Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America, (with Gaspar Gonzalez, 2006), Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2005), Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (2000), Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995).
(Considered by many to be the best political thriller ever...)
2008(In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in w...)
2008("A scholarly study of the real roots of what Jacobson cal...)
2002(America’s racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkabl...)
1999(How a new American identity was forged by immigration and...)
2001Jacobson is a member of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association.
Jacobson married Francesca Schwartz in 1993. They have a son, Nicholas Schwartz.
