Robert J. Norrell
See Also: Curriculum Vitae
Field Specialties
Southern history, U.S. history in the 20th Century, American race relations
Professor Norrell writes about race relations and southern history. In 2005 he published a highly-acclaimed interpretive synthesis of race relations in the twentieth-century United States, The House I Live In: Race in the American Century. His book Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1986. He has published several other books on southern history. Norrell is currently at work on a biography of Booker T. Washington. He is the author of 16 scholarly articles. In 2005 and 2006 he gave invited lectures at Oxford University, the University of Cambridge, the University of North Carolina, and several other universities. In 2006 Professor Norrell received the Booker T. Washington Legacy Prize given by the Heartland Insitute for his work on the Alabama educator.
Professor Norrell teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in southern history and graduate courses in recent United States history.
He has directed doctoral dissertations on education reform, environmental history, black religion, southern economic history, race relations in housing, and modern southern political history. His numerous masters students have worked on topics in race relations and southern history. His students are now employed at various universities and high schools around the United States.
Education
- Ph.D. University of Virginia, 1983
Selected Publications
- The House I Live In: Race in the American Century (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). Revised edition, 1998, University of North Carolina Press.
- A Promising Field: Engineering at Alabama, 1837-1987 (University of Alabama Press, 1990).
- James Bowron: The Autobiography of a New South Industrialist (UNC Press, 1991).
- Making America Safe for Democracy: Evolving Images of African Americans in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, in Flavia Brizio-Skov, ed.,Reconstructing Societies in the Aftermath of War: Memory, Identity, and Reconstruction (Boca Raton: Bordighera Press, 2004), 269-78.
- Understanding the Wizard: Another Look at the Age of Booker T. Washington, in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: A Centenary of
Up From Slavery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003)
- Labor at the Ballot Box: Unions in Alabama Politics from the New Deal to the Dixiecrat Movement, Journal of Southern History (May 1991).
- Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama, Journal of American History (December 1986).
- Labor Trouble: George Wallace and Union Politics in Alabama, in Robert Zieger, ed., Twentieth-Century Southern Labor History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991)
- One Thing We Did Right: Protest, History, and the Civil Rights Movement, in New Directions in Civil Rights Studies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991).
- After Thirty Years of 'New' Labour History, There Is Still No Socialism in Reagan Country, Historical Journal (March 1990).
- Steelworkers and Storekeepers: Social Mobility Among Italian Immigrants in Birmingham, in Rocco Caporale, ed., The Italian Americans Through the Generations (New York: American Italian Historical Association, 1986).
Selected Honors and Awards
- The Mellon Research Fellowship in American History, 1984-85, University of Cambridge
- Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 1986
- Special Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle, 1991
Contact Information
Robert J. Norrell
Professor of History and Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence
915 Volunteer Boulevard
6th Floor, Dunford Hall
Knoxville, TN 37996-4065
Office: (865) 974-1130
Fax: (865) 974-3915
Email: rnorrell@utk.edu