Jacob Anbinder

Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow

Image of Jacob Anbinder
438 McGraw Hall
ja844@cornell.edu

Education

  • PhD, Harvard University, 2023
  • MA, Harvard University, 2018
  • BA, Yale University, 2014

Departments and programs

  • History

Links

Overview

Jacob Anbinder is a historian of the modern United States with a particular focus on the politics of cities and suburbs in the twentieth century. His research interests include the political economy of major infrastructure projects, movements for and against change to the built environment, and the ways in which sprawl and spatial segregation create social inequities. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Business History Review, The Week, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other outlets.

Jacob received his PhD in history from Harvard University in 2023.

Research Focus

NIMBY Nation, Jacob's current book project, is the first history of the modern urban affordability crisis and the political origins of the liberal “NIMBY.” It traces their roots to the national party realignment of the late twentieth century and, specifically, to the ideological transformations that took place among liberals around the issue of urban growth. During the New Deal Era, Democrats across the country emphatically supported the growth of cities and suburbs. Beginning in the fifties, however, Americans dismayed by the unfulfilled promises of postwar society began to question the idea that “the good life” demanded the continued development of the places in which they lived. Over the decades that followed, a constellation of loosely related citizen efforts to guide, limit, or reverse the course of metropolitan growth coalesced into a powerful movement uniting voters, activists, intellectuals, and politicians who once had little in common. By the late twentieth century, their work had produced a new antigrowth liberalism that appealed to disillusioned New Dealers, lapsed leftists, and moderates abandoning the Republican Party. This new generation of Democrats was much more skeptical of—and in many cases downright hostile toward—not only urban growth itself, but also the idea that such growth was in any way compatible with liberalism as they now defined it.

Based on Jacob's award-winning dissertation, NIMBY Nation offers a new understanding of the thing that we call “liberalism,” the influence of local politics in its creation, and its role in making modern American society. While many on the left believe today that America’s most pressing problems—particularly in its largest cities—originate in the Democratic Party’s supposed rightward turn, the history of antigrowth politics shows that Democrats never abandoned their core principle of using government power to effect social progress. Rather, in “blue” cities across the country, new groups of liberals reworked New Deal liberalism to serve different goals, on different ideological bases, at different levels of governance. Their success at reining in the “growth machine” benefited a fortunate few. Yet, their worldview’s own contradictions—unresolved and perhaps unresolvable—also produced the permanent housing shortages, exorbitant real estate prices, unsustainable commutes, and intensified segregation that plague cities today. Moving away from the popular idea that America followed a linear path from “big government” to “neoliberalism,” NIMBY Nation demonstrates that our current cost-of-living crisis is the result not of the inexorable power of laissez-faire—or of simplistic liberal hypocrisy—but rather of Democrats’ deliberate attempts to improve the cities and suburbs in which they lived.

Awards and Honors

•   Leo P. Ribuffo Prize for best dissertation in U.S. intellectual history, Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2024.​

•   Anthony Sutcliffe Dissertation Award for best English-language dissertation in the history of city planning, International Planning History Society, 2024.

•   Honorable Mention, Michael Katz Award for best dissertation in urban history, Urban History Association, 2024.

•   History Prize Instructorship, Harvard University History Department, Spring 2023.

•   Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for excellence in the art of teaching (2x), Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, 2022 and 2023.

•   Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University, Spring 2021.

•   Raymond J. Cunningham Prize, American Historical Association, for best article published in an undergraduate history journal, awarded to “The South Shall Ride Again: The Origins of MARTA and the Making of the Urban South,” 2014.

•   Writing contest winner for a model essay in the discipline of history, Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, Yale University, awarded to “In the Fold of America: Immigration Politics in the Alien and Sedition Era,” 2013.

Professional Experience

Courses taught:

  • HIST 15J, “Suburban Wars: The American Suburb in the Twentieth Century,” Spring 2023, Harvard University (as instructor of record).
  • HIST 97H, “What Is Urban History?”, Spring 2021, Harvard University (instructor of record: Prof. Lizabeth Cohen).
  • HIST 97H, “What Is Urban History?”, Spring 2019, Harvard University (instructor of record: Prof. Elizabeth Hinton).
  • HIST 60O, “American Indian History in Four Acts” Fall 2018, Harvard University (instructor of record: Prof. Philip J. Deloria).​

Affiliations

  • American Historical Association
  • Organization of American Historians
  • Society for American City and Regional Planning History
  • Urban History Association

Publications

Academic publications:

 

Selected writing for popular audiences:

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