Guian McKee

Guian McKee

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Phone: 434-243-8856

Guian McKee joined the Miller Center's Presidential Recordings Program in August 2002. He received a Ph.D. in American history at the University of California, Berkeley in May 2002; prior to joining the Miller Center, McKee was a visiting scholar in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include U.S. social policy history and urban history. He is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia, published in November 2008 by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of Lyndon Johnson and the War on Poverty: How Policymakers Try to Deliver on Social Promises (tentative title), which will be published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. He has published articles in the Journal of Urban History, Journal of Policy History, Journal of Planning History, and the Boston Globe. In April 2007, he delivered the keynote address at the conference "In the Shadow of the Great Society: American Politics, Culture and Society Since 1964," hosted by the Rothermere American Institute and the American History Research Seminar, University of Oxford, U.K.

McKee teaches courses on American social policy history and urban history.

View his curriculum vitae.

Miller Center Projects

At the Miller Center, McKee works with the Presidential Recordings Program, where he is the editor of Volumes 6 and 7 of The Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson. These volumes cover the period from mid-April to mid-June 1964, during which the Johnson administration lobbied for passage of the Civil Rights and Economic Opportunity Acts and struggled with increasing difficulties in Southeast Asia. Volume 6 was published by W.W. Norton and Company in 2007; volume 7 will be published in 2009. McKee is also preparing a thematic volume that will include Johnson's recorded conversations about the War on Poverty. This project will be published digitally by the University of Virginia Press through its Rotunda electronic imprint. He was the co-organizer (with Lisa Hazijirian) of the Miller Center Conference, "The War on Poverty and Grassroots Struggles for Racial and Economic Justice" (November 9-10, 2007).

Selected Publications

• "Arlen Specter seizes the day — again," Boston Globe, April 30, 2009
• "A Wasteful and Dangerous Thing: Lyndon Johnson and Grassroots Activism," in The War on Poverty & Struggles for Racial & Economic Justice: Views from the Grassroots ed. Lisa Hazijirian (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, forthcoming, 2009).
• "'I've Never Dealt With a Government Agency Before': Philadelphia's Somerset Knitting Mills Project, the Local State, and the Missed Opportunities of Urban Renewal," Journal of Urban History, Special Issue on Urban Renewal, forthcoming 2008.
• "Learning From Past Poverty Wars," Boston Globe, July 26, 2007, p. A9
• "Blue Sky Boys, Professional Citizens, and Knights in Shining Money: Philadelphia's Penn Center Project and the Constraints of Private Development," Journal of Policy History 6, no. 7 (February 2007).
• "Urban Deindustrialization and Local Public Policy: Industrial Renewal in Philadelphia, 1953-1976," Journal of Policy History 16, no. 1 (2004): 66-98.
• "Prelude to Faith-Based Initiatives?: The Johnson Presidential Recordings and the Debate over Parochial Schools in the War on Poverty," Miller Center Report 19, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 21-27.
• "Liberal Ends Through Illiberal Means: Race, Urban Renewal, and Community in the Eastwick Section of Philadelphia, 1949-1990," Journal of Urban History 27, no. 5 (July 2001): 547-583.
• Review of City Against Suburb: The Culture Wars in an American Metropolis, by Joseph A. Rodriguez, in The Western Historical Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 513-514.

Course List

• Health and Health Care in U.S. History
• "Work, Poverty, and Welfare: 20th Century U.S. Social Policy"
• "Suburban America: Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier?"
• Creating the American Metropolis: Cities and Suburbs in the Twentieth Century United States, Rodman Honors Seminar, spring 2003