Thomas A. Guglielmo

Title — Associate Professor of American Studies

Address — 609 22nd Street, Room 203

Phone — 202-994-3170

E-mail — tguglielmoGW@gmail.com

Areas of Expertise —

race and ethnicity, civil rights, immigration, social and political history

Current Research

Tom Guglielmo is presently at work on a second book, Race War: World War II and the Crisis of American Democracy (under contract with Oxford University Press).  The book examines a motley mix of Americans and their struggles over the meaning and boundaries of race.  In the frenetic wartime world of conscription, materiel production, labor migration, and combat, novel possibilities for both scrambling and solidifying racial hierarchies abounded.  The state, civil institutions, and ordinary people wrestled over what role race would play, if any, in American life. Should existing boundaries be preserved, redrawn, or eliminated?  Who should and would decide?  On what basis?  And to what effect? The book explores this complex set of questions—and Americans’ struggles to find answers.

Education

PhD, University Michigan, 2000

Background

Tom Guglielmo’s teaching and research interests include race and ethnic studies, immigration, and twentieth-century U.S. social, cultural, and political history. He teaches courses on race, civil rights, immigration, World War II, and the modern United States.  His first book, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2003), received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. It argued primarily that numerous individuals and institutions both questioned Italians’ racial desirability (as Italians, South Italians, Sicilians, and Latins) and accepted them as “white on arrival” in the United States.  This argument challenged a central tenet of whiteness scholarship, namely that European immigrants were “in-between peoples,” temporary occupants of a not-quite-white murky middle.  Prof. Guglielmo argued, instead, that some whiteness scholars, by failing to appreciate the differences between “color” categories (e.g., white and black) and European “racial” ones (e.g., Latin and Nordic), underestimated the stability—and, unwittingly, some of the concrete advantages—of European immigrants’ white status.

Publications

Book:

White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Articles and Chapters:

“Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890-1945,” (co-authored with Cybelle Fox). American Journal of Sociology 118 (September 2012): 327-379

“’Red Cross, Double Cross’: Race and America’s World War II-Era Blood Donor Service.” Journal of American History 97 (June 2010): 63-90.

“Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas.” Journal of American History 92 (March 2006): 1212-1237.

“Encountering the Color Line in the Everyday: Italians in Interwar Chicago.” Journal of American Ethnic History 23 (Summer 2004): 45-77.

Republished in Race and Immigration in the United States: New Histories, edited by Paul Spickard, 148-177. London: Routledge, 2011.

Republished in Reconstructing Italians in Chicago: Thirty Authors in Search of Roots and Branches, edited by Dominic Candeloro, 81-112. Stone Park, IL: Italian Cultural Center/Casa Italia, 2011.

“Rethinking U.S. Whiteness Historiography.” In Whiteout: The Continuing Significance of Racism, edited by Ashley Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, 49-61. New York: Routledge, 2003.

“‘No Color Barrier’: Italians, Race, and Power in the United States.” In Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made in America, edited by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, 29-43. New York: Routledge, 2003.

“The Changing Meaning of Difference: Race, Color, and Ethnicity in America, 1930-1964,” (co-authored with Earl Lewis). In Race and Ethnicity in America: A Concise History, edited by Ronald H. Bayor, 167-192. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

“Toward Essentialism, Toward Difference: Gino Speranza and Conceptions of Race and Italian-American Racial Identity, 1900-1925.” Mid-America 81 (Summer 1999): 169-213.

General Interest Essays:

“What I Know about Racial Preferences,” The Observer, February 8, 2004.

Classes Taught

American Social Movements (graduate seminar)

Race in America (graduate seminar)

The United States and the World (graduate seminar)

Twentieth-Century US Immigration History (undergraduate lecture/discussion)

World War II in History and Memory (undergraduate lecture/discussion)