Jonathan M Soffer
Associate Professor of History
Technology, Culture and Society
- Phone: (718) 260-3448
- Email: jsoffer@duke.poly.edu
- Location: LC 126
- Website:
Education
Columbia University, Class of 1992
Doctor of Philosophy, History
Sturm College of Law, University of Denver, Class of 1982
Juris Doctor,
Columbia College, Columbia University, Class of 1978
Bachelor of Arts,
Courses Taught
History of New York City; Introduction to Urban Infrastructure; Urban Environmental History; Seminar on Urban Infrastructure History History of Mass Media Urban Infrastructure in Transnational Perspective (NYU History Dep't).
Research Interests
- Twentieth-century American political and urban history.
Awards + Distinctions
- Fellow, New York Academy of History, elected 2012.
- Gilder Lehrman Foundation Fellow, 2011-12
- Board Member, Urban History Association, 2012
Event Participation
Professional Societies
- American Historical Association
- Organization of American Historians
- Urban History Association
- Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Affiliations
- American HIstorical Association, Organization of American Historians, Urban History Association
Grants
$1500 Schoff Fund, ()
Columbia University Seminars, for the publication of Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York. 2009
Journal Articles
“Mayor Edward I. Koch and New York’s Municipal Foreign Policy” in Shane Ewen and Pierre Yves Saunier, eds. Another Global City. Transnational Municipal Trails in the Modern Age (1850-2000) (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 119-34.
“All Politics are Global: Nineteenth Century New York History in its Own World Wide Web” Urban History 32.2 ( Cambridge UP, 2005).
“The National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism, 1950-1975,” Business History Review, 75 (Winter 2001): 775-805.
“Bleaching the Lily: Robert A. Taft, Barry Goldwater and Republican Southern Strategies, 1940-64” in Jürgen Heideking, Jörg Helbig, and Anke Ortlepp, eds., The Sixties Revisited: Culture, Society, Politics, American Studies Monograph Series (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2001), 487-502. A study of the Republican Party’s southern strategies since 1940, and the increased racial polarization of the party system since Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.
“Ammonia” Public 19/20: Lexicon vol. 1 & 2 (Winter/Spring 2000).
An essay based on a family story about Nobel laureate Fritz Haber, inventor of synthetic ammonia and chemical warfare.
“All for One or One for One: The U.N. Military Staff Committee and the Contradictions of American Internationalism.” Diplomatic History, vol. 21 no. 1 (Winter 1997), 45-69. A study of the original negotiations to establish combat-ready UN military forces in 1946-48, arguing that the deliberate vagueness of the charter, as much as Cold War tensions, prevented agreement on the creation of a permanent international military force under the auspices of the UN.
“Oral History and American Foreign Policy.” Journal of American History, v. 82, no. 2 (Sept. 1995), 607-16. Historians of American foreign relations, who could find more uses for oral history texts if they read them in new ways, have underutilized oral history.
Other Publications
REVIEWS AND REFERENCE ARTICLES
Urban History Association, 2010 Prize Committee for best article in the field published in 2009.
Review of Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (Oxford UP, 2009) for Business History Review forthcoming Summer 2010.
Review of Bruce J. Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008) Journal of American History, Volume 95, no. 3 (December 2008), 928-9.
Manuscript review, Max Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Review of Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse UP, 2001) and Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2002) Urban History, Volume 30, Issue 03, Dec 2003, pp 436-439.
“Reform Democratic Clubs” in Peter Eisenstadt, ed. The Encyclopedia of New York State (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005).
Referee for the David Thelen Prize Committee, Organization of American Historians, prize for the translation and publication of the best foreign article on American history in the Journal of American History, 2002.
Review of Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001) for H-POL, H-NET, July 20, 2001.
“Matthew B. Ridgway” in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed. The Scribner’s Encyclopedia of American Lives.v. 3 (New York: Scribners, 2001).
Review of William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 28 nos. 3&4 (1996).
Review of Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action (Berkeley: UC Press, 1990) in The Oral History Review, 19:1&2 (Spring/Fall, 1991), 136-37.
Contributing Editor, The Court TV Cradle to Grave Legal Survival Guide. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).
Authored + Edited Books
Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (Columbia University Press, 2010) .
A history of New York in the 1970s and 1980s. It tells the story of the larger-than-life mayor who led the Big Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s and 1980s. Koch had inherited a city declining in population and wealth in a country where politics was increasingly dominated by conservative suburbanites. Arsonists destroyed so many buildings that one neighborhood in the Bronx was even used as a film location for the firebombing of Dresden. But Koch’s New York Koch—with bistros springing up along Columbus Avenue, Wall Street growing fat on junk bonds, and rental housing converting to condos—became a place that was growing rather than shrinking during his twelve years in office.
For better or worse, Koch convinced many New Yorkers to embrace a new political order that subsidized business and privatized public space. Faced with the need to promote economic growth, the Koch administration made difficult choices between moneyed interests and New York’s social democratic tradition, forcing Koch to be both moderate and pragmatic, mitigating the increasing economic inequalities while subsidizing an ostensibly laissez-faire system. Some of Koch's rhetoric and decisions increased racial tensions. Homelessness, crime, and AIDS increased, especially in his third term. His administration was tainted by scandals. But he bravely faced one of the worst financial crises in the city’s history. After restoring the city’s credit, he repaired a damaged urban fabric, rebuilding neighborhoods and infrastructure devastated by arson and disinvestment, and with minimal help from an anti-urban federal government. The first book to recast Koch’s legacy through personal and mayoral papers, and authorized interviews, this volume resolves the issue of Koch’s impact through a detailed account of his administration’s politics and policies.
General Matthew B. Ridgway: From Progressivism to Reaganism 1895-1993. (Westport, CT.: Praeger, 1998).