Chris Agee

My research focuses on twentieth-century American history, with particular focuses on social and cultural movements, gender history, political history, oral history, and urban history.  I teach courses in the history of crime and policing, the history of the American West, and modern American history.  My manuscript, The Streets of San Francisco: Blacks, Beats, Gays, and the San Francisco Police Department, 1950-71, examines how post-World War II San Franciscans used the politics of policing to create modern urban liberalism.  By identifying personal, street-level interactions between the police and the community as a primary site of twentieth-century politics, I show that blacks, artists, and gays and lesbians each helped to transform postwar San Francisco into a paragon of modern liberalism.  In earlier research projects I analyzed the relationship between liberalism and cosmopolitan culture by examining the West Coast punk scene during the 1970s and black-Jewish relations during the 1930s.  In my future teaching and research, I plan to compare San Francisco’s liberal model with the liberal regimes of other world cities in North America, Europe, and Asia.