Professor of History
James Connolly is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University.. He is the author of An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America (Cornell University Press) and The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston , 1900-1925 (Harvard University Press). He also edited After the Factory: Reinventing America’s Industrial Small Cities (Lexington Books) and has published numerous articles and essays in edited volumes and journals such as Social Science History, theJournal of Urban History, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Connolly’s research focuses on American urban, political, and ethnic history in the 1870-1930 period. He is currently at work on “What Middletown Read,” a study of print culture and urban life at the turn of the twentieth century, in collaboration with Frank Felsenstein.