Rate My Professor Steven Reich

Steven Reich is a professor in the Department of History at James Madison University, where he joined the faculty in 1999 following the completion of his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 1998. His fields and specialties include American labor history and African American history. Reich teaches courses in labor history, African American history, Southern history, and research methods. In the Africana American and African Studies program, he offers HIST 356: African American History Since 1865 and HIST 322: The New South, while serving on the AAAD Budget Planning Committee and AAAD Internal Advisory Board. He also chairs the Department of History Personnel Advisory Committee.

Reich's research centers on African American working-class history, with a particular emphasis on the long-term legacies of Jim Crow and resistance against it. He edited the Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration (Greenwood Press, 2006) and The World of Jim Crow America: A Daily Life Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 2019). His monograph A Working People: A History of African American Workers since Emancipation was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2013. Key articles include 'Soldiers of Democracy: Black Texans and the Fight for Citizenship, 1917-1921' in the Journal of American History (1996), which received the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award; 'The Great Migration and the Literary Imagination' in the Journal of the Historical Society (2009); and 'The Great War, Black Workers, and the Rise and Fall of the NAACP in the South' in The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (University of Illinois Press, 2007). In 2024, Reich was awarded a one-year National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for his book project 'Buzzards Over Texas: A Story of Race, Violence and the Search for Justice in the Jim Crow South,' which reconstructs the history of the Sandy Beulah settlement destroyed by mob violence in 1910. His scholarship has advanced understandings of race, labor, migration, and citizenship struggles in the American South and beyond.