UCI historian Andrew R. Highsmith receives two awards for scholarship on racial and economic inequality
Office of the Dean
September 26, 2016
Highsmith receives the American Historical Association's Pacific Coast Branch Award for his book & History of Education Society Prize for co-written article
Andrew R. Highsmith, assistant professor of history at UCI, has received the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch Award for his book, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (University of Chicago Press, 2015). The Pacific Coast Branch Award honors the best book submitted by a scholar residing in the states and provinces from which the branch draws its membership. The award is only offered for first books.
Demolition Means Progress explores the spatial and structural barriers to racial equality and economic opportunity in metropolitan Flint from the early twentieth century to the present. An in-depth case study of the political economy of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Demolition Means Progress explains how the perennial quest for urban renewal—even more than white flight, corporate abandonment, and other forces—contributed to mass suburbanization, racial and economic division, deindustrialization, and political fragmentation.
During coverage of Flint’s recent lead-in-water crisis, Highsmith was a sought-after expert who shared his scholarship with news and media outlets around the nation (see here).
Additionally, Highsmith and co-author Ansley Erickson, assistant professor of history and education at Columbia University (Teachers College), recently received the History of Education Society Prize for their August 2015 American Journal of Education article, "Segregation as Splitting, Segregation as Joining: Schools, Housing, and the Many Modes of Jim Crow." The prize is awarded biennially to the author(s) of the most distinguished scholarly article/essay in educational history.
A reprint of Highsmith’s Demolition Means Progress is now available in paperback via Amazon here.