Research Interests
My research centers on the relationship between law, politics, and American culture. I am particularly interested in the ways in which politicians attempt to shape and respond to social issues and how cultural trends shape law and policy. These interests lead me to investigate questions of nationalism, law- and policymaking, public opinion, social movements, race, and political culture.
Current Manuscript Project
In the Crucible of Violence: The Remaking of American Political Culture in the 1960s and 1970s
Scholars have long argued that U.S. politics became more divided and right leaning in response to 1960s’ unrest, but they have underestimated the role violence, both in concept and reality, played in the politics of the period. In the Crucible of Violence demonstrates that public anxiety about violence is key to understanding the political conflicts at the time. Using a range of government and popular media sources, each chapter focuses on an individual type of violence with a single event as its anchor, such as police shootings of black college students, a series of murders in San Francisco, and the My Lai massacre. The public interpreted these events to be part of a larger pattern of intensifying violence, and thus debated them through that lens. Viewing issues through the violence lens stymied political action while preventing politicians from crafting effective policy responses. Actors across the political spectrum used violence as justification to dismiss their opponents. Further, these debates undermined, but did not eradicate, dominant racialized narratives justifying state violence against minorities, including black activists in the United States and Vietnamese civilians across the globe. The violence problem, consequently, transformed how Americans understood the limits of the American system at home and abroad, nurturing disillusionment with government and a divisive political culture that still thrives today.
A portion of this research has also been published in the Journal of Urban History and is available here.
Christine M. Lamberson 