I am currently a Lecturer in the Departments of History and African American Studies at University of California-Los Angeles. From 2014-2016, I was the Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I received my PhD from University of Southern California’s Department of American Studies and Ethnicity in 2014. Trained in interdisciplinary methods, I am a historian whose work focuses on the interconnection between social movements and economic and social policy in post-1865 U.S. history. My fields of interest include African American Studies, history of capitalism, working-class history, policing and imprisonment, fiscal and monetary policy, and heterodox economics. My book manuscript, Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The Civil Rights Struggle for Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State, 1929-1986, is under contract with University of North Carolina Press for their Justice, Power and Politics series. Fearing Inflation focuses on the politics and economics of unemployment. It details the efforts of Black freedom movement organizers to create governmental guarantees to a job or income, and how such efforts were stifled. In so doing, Fearing Inflation describes the long history and aftermath of the campaign designed by civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and prominent economist Leon Keyserling for a “Freedom Budget for All Americans,” in the mid-1960s, and the subsequent attempts to achieve legislation to guarantee employment led by Coretta Scott King and the Full Employment Action Council in the 1970s.

I am also working two new book projects. The first—There Were Alternatives: Working Class Resistance to Racism and Neoliberalism—is a linked set of biographies of leading activists who worked in, alongside, and sometimes against trade unions to resist the impacts of neoliberalism. It investigates the work of Coretta Scott King and the Full Employment Action Council; Cleveland Robinson and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; James Haughton and the Harlem Unemployment Center and Fight Back; and Jerry Tucker and United Auto Workers New Directions movement.

The second—Making Money: Racial Capitalism from the Gold Standard to the Dollar Standard—examines the history of money through the lens of racial capitalism. I situate the history of the international gold standard alongside that of gold miners in South Africa and elsewhere to show how the labors of gold miners were integral to international trade in the late 19th Century and after. I then describe the struggles to create monetary stability and faith in fiat currencies in the mid-twentieth centuries and after. In so doing, I inquire into the racial politics of central bank independence and what role this has played in leading central banks to prioritize inflation containment above employment, and how central bank independence has enabled U.S. Treasury securities to serve as a key source of portfolio stability for investors throughout the world.

I also co-host and produce Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast with Betsy Beasley.

Education:
Ph.D.  American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, 2014
M.A. African American Studies, American Studies, Yale University, 2010
B.A. African American Studies, Sociology, Wesleyan University, 2006
Address: https://davidpstein.wordpress.com/