Research Expertise and Interest

20th century U.S. history, with a focus on political economy, civil rights, education, law, and the west

Research Description

Mark Brilliant (Brown, B.A., 1989, Stanford, Ph.D., 2002) is an associate professor in the Department of History and Program in American Studies. Within U.S. history, he focuses on 20th century political economy, civil rights, education, law, and the west. His first book ,The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978 (Oxford, 2010), won the Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History and received honorable mention from the Organization of American Historians for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award. He is currently working on a book entitled From School Bus to Google Bus: A New Politics, a New Economy, and the Rise of the New Gilded Age. It examines the relationship between the new (post-industrial, high technology) economy and the new (post-New Deal, post-Great Society, bipartisan neoliberal) politics from the late 1960s through the late 1980s and how they contributed to the rise of the New (or Second) Gilded Age, as it would come to be known.