Dr. Eric S. Yellin

Assistant Professor of History
105 Ryland Hall
Office: (804) 289-8465
Fax: (804) 287-1992

Teaching:
State & Society in the United States
Scottsboro Trials
American Identities
1970s America
Core Course: Exploring Human Experience

Research:
Modern United States
US Political and Social History
African-American History

Education:
Ph.D., Princeton University
M.A., Princeton University
B.A., Columbia University

Academic and Professional Activities:
I am interested in reform movements that sought to address perceived social, political, and economic inequality in modern America. My work seeks to understand power in American society and the ways in which Americans have voiced claims for rights and welfare in the twentieth century.

My current project examines federal employment as a lever and obstacle for racial equality and social mobility in the age of progressive politics.  Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic administration dismantled a Republican Reconstruction-era coalition of black and white liberals that had struggled throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to safeguard government offices as places of racial egalitarianism.  My work  documents the federal employment that offered so much promise for African Americans in Washington, DC.  It also documents the crisis for black Americans who suffered and protested as one of the last bulwarks against racism in the United States collapsed.