William E. Huntington Professor of History

20th-century U.S. history

Bruce J. Schulman is the William E. Huntington Professor of History at Boston University. He is the author of three books and editor of six others: From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1991); Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994); and The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Politics, and Society (N.Y.: Free Press, 2001). The New York Times named The Seventies one of its Notable Books of the Year for 2001. An anthology of essays, co-edited with Julian Zelizer, entitled Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, was published by Harvard University Press in March 2008, and another, The Constitution and Public Policy, by Pennsylvania University Press in 2009. He has also edited Making the American Century, (Oxford University Press, 2014), Recapturing the Oval Office, (co-edited with Brian Balogh, Cornell University Press, 2015), Faithful Republic (co-edited with Andrew Preston and Julian Zelizer, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), and Media Nation (co-edited with Julian Zelizer, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, as well as websites such as Politico and Reuters. Professor Schulman has appeared as an expert commentator on many television and radio programs and has consulted on productions by the History Channel, PBS, and ABC-News.

Schulman has held research fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the Marjorie Kovler Fund of the Blum-Kovler Foundation.

Schulman has also directed the research of 32 doctoral students, who have produced among them 27 books and occupied faculty positions at Columbia, San Francisco State, UMass-Boston, UCLA, Purdue, Cal State Bakersfield, Armstrong Atlantic University, Tougaloo College, Bryant University, Salem State University, the University of Arkansas, Boston University, and several others. In recognition of that work, the American Historical association named him the 2006 recipient of the Nancy Lyman Roelker Award.

His interest in teaching led Schulman to join in a major curriculum reform project in California. In 1989-90, Schulman served as Director of the History Project in California, a joint effort of the University of California and the California State Department of Education to improve history education in the public primary and secondary schools. For his efforts, he received a letter of commendation from the State Department of Education. From 2000-2009, he led a Teaching American History (TAH) Grant program that partners Boston University with the Boston Public Schools. In 1993, as Associate Professor of History at UCLA, Schulman received the Charles and Harriet Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award and the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. In January 2004, the Organization of American Historians appointed him to its Distinguished Lecturer program. In January 2006, the American Historical Association conferred on him the Nancy Lyman Roelker Award for graduate mentorship. In December 2007 he was named the United Methodist Scholar/Teacher of the Year. In 2015, he was named a national semi-finalist for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers.

Schulman’s teaching and research concentrate on the history of the modern United States, particularly on the relationships between politics and broader cultural change. Schulman is currently at work on a volume for the Oxford History of the United States covering the years 1896-1929.

Schulman also directs the Institute for American Political History at Boston University. The Institute seeks to establish Boston University as a leading center for the study of America’s political past. Drawing on the strength of existing faulty (both in the History Department and other departments), the objective is to create an intellectual hub that will benefit undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and alumni of Boston University as well as the wider Boston community. The Institute organizes a monthly seminar, as well as an annual graduate student conference and the annual International Political History Conference, co-sponsored with University College, London, Emory University, the University of Califoirnia, Berkeley, the University of California, Davis, and Stanford University.

He lives in Somerville, MA.

Curriculum Vitae