Malcolm McLaughlin

Malcolm McLaughlin is a cultural historian of the USA and the Transatlantic world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He is currently working on a new book about outdoor-sportswriting, and its relationship to changing attitudes to the environment and nation at the turn of the twentieth century. Connected to that work, he is involved in a collaborative project on the history of tourism and environmental thought, in this case focusing on Yosemite National Park. Meanwhile, he is also engaged in a collaborative project looking at the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome in order to understand the local and global histories of circus and the development of tourism and popular entertainments. 

Previously, his research has looked at the interplay of race and class in the development of democratic society in the twentieth century. His first book was a study of community, white identity, and racial violence in the Progressive Era, focusing on events surrounding the notorious East St. Louis race riot or massacre of 1917. (Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 2005). His second book was about liberal politics and the urban riots or rebellions of the of the 1960s, and took a critical look at the response of Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House to those events. (The Long, Hot Summer of 1967, 2014).

He has supervised PhD projects across a range of topics in American history and culture. His research students have in recent years looked at culture, community, and politics in San Francisco, the death penalty in the American justice system, the NAACP and civil rights in the 1920s-1930s, the politics of English-language education in California in the 1980s-2010s, Jewish-American lawyers and the civil rights movement in the 1930s-1960s, and the history of German-American Boston, 1900-1920.

My current research focuses on the history of tourism and popular sport, travel, and adventure writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. The work is concerned in particular with the relationship between consumer culture and the development of national identity in the age of global empire. 

Previously, I have written on the history of race in the United States of America and in comparative context.

Cultural history of 19th and 20th centuries

U.S. and Transatlantic culture

Media and consumption

Media, culture, and politics

History of popular print culture

History of sport and leisure

History of environmental ideas

History of race, class, and democracy

Dr McLaughlin was Head of School (Art, Media and American Studies) from 2016-2022.