Daniel Amsterdam
Ph.D. Candidate (ABD)
damster3@sas.upenn.edu
Education
Yale (B.A., 1999); Brown (M.A.T., 2003); Penn (A.B.D. since 2006)
Research Interests
The history of American politics and public policy
Examination Fields
American History, 1600-1980; American Urban History; The History and Foundations of American Education
Dissertation
"The Roaring Metropolis: Business, Civic Welfare, and Statebuilding in 1920s America"
Dissertation Committee
Personal Statement
My dissertation rethinks the political history of the United States between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression. Historians long ago rejected the myth of the 1920s as the twentieth-century heyday of laissez faire. Yet government expansion in New Era America went far beyond early federal forays into economic planning. In states and especially in cities throughout the country, public spending skyrocketed to unprecedented heights. My work focuses primarily on the growth of urban social spending during these years and through cases studies of Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia asks: how, amidst fiscal conservatism in Washington and the stagnation of the social welfare state, did Americans manage to vastly increase provisions for schooling, parks, playgrounds, museums, libraries, public health and the basic infrastructure to promote urban decentralization and suburbanization? While some historians have glossed over this trend by suggesting that progressivism simply persisted at the local level even as the movement languished on the national stage, I argue that because of a shift in the contours of government expansion and the increased prominence of businessmen in social reform, the 1920s in fact comprised a singular moment in the history of American statebuilding.
My work has been supported by a CLIR/Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources, the Hugh Davis Graham Award from the Institute for Political History as well as by fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania. I have presented my work at the conferences of the Urban History Association, the Social Science History Association as well as at the Policy History Conference. In 2007, I was co-winner of the award for best paper on American history at Temple University’s Barnes Club Conference for graduate students and recently was co-organizer of the conference, "Politics, Activism, and the History of America’s Public Schools," held in part to mark the 40th Anniversary of Michael B. Katz’s The Irony of Early School Reform and sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Spencer Foundation and a number of departments at Penn.
While at Penn I have also served as a bibliographer and a participant in the Philadelphia Migration Project, which studies the impact of recent immigration on the Philadelphia region. In 2005, I was a fellow in Penn’s Writing Across the University (WATU) program, a curricular initiative to improve undergraduate writing.
