Dr. Eric S. Yellin

Professor Yellin is a historian of the United States with emphasis on twentieth-century American politics, race and racism, and the history of the US federal government. In addition to teaching at UR, Yellin was Visiting Curator for the new Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. from 2019-2023.

His first book, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America (UNC Press 2013), examines federal employment as a lever and obstacle for racial equality and social mobility in the age of progressive politics. Spanning the period from Reconstruction to the 1920s, Racism in the Nation's Service reveals how the post-Civil War Republican patronage machine supported a growing black middle class in Washington, D.C., and how, in turn, racial discrimination in federal offices during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson implicated the United States government in the economic limitation of African Americans.

Yellin is also co-editor, with Frederick W. Gooding, Jr., of Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader (Illinois Press 2023). The book brings together research from leading historians of public-sector labor to establish a state of the field and chart new directions for research on this crucial group of American workers.

Yellin’s current research examines the intersection of American Jewish experience and public history and memory in twentieth-century Washington, D.C.