Clayton Howard
Contact Information
Associate Professor
he/his
Areas of Expertise
- US history since 1877
- urban and suburban history
Education
- University of Michigan, PhD 2010
Clayton Howard is a specialist in postwar U.S. history. His research interests include the histories of American cities, suburbs, gender, sexuality, race, and politics.
In March 2019, the University of Pennsylvania Press published his book The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California. This book uses the history of the San Francisco Bay Area from World War II to the late 1970s to explain the origins and scope of the nation’s culture wars over gay rights.
Howard’s article "Building a 'Family Friendly' Metropolis: Sexuality, the State, and Postwar Housing Policy" was published in the Journal of Urban History in September 2013. He also wrote a history of the Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest group of gay conservatives. It can be found in an anthology entitled Beyond the Politics of the Closet.
Read some of his most recent work on LGBTQ rights and economic development.
Howard is currently researching a book entitled Gun Politics are Family Politics: An Intimate History of Americans and Firearms in the Late Twentieth Century. This project explores the way that numerous activists in the gun control debates spoke about the need to protect their loved ones from danger. During the 1970s and 1980s, majorities of Americans identified numerous threats to their families, such as no-fault divorce, feminism, single-parent households, child predators, and the absence of government-supported childcare. These concerns also played out in the era's debates about firearms as activists across the ideological spectrum claimed that gun control or its absence threatened their families. This book, therefore, connects later twentieth century gun politics to the era's larger politics about gender, sexuality, and domesticity. The project also tells the stories of people who cared for their loved ones after experiencing gun violence. Health studies frequently reported that tens of thousands of Americans died from firearms-related homicides, suicides, and accidents in the 1970s and 1980s. An even higher number of people sustained injuries from guns in the same period. Gun Politics are Family Politics, therefore, will not only highlight the ways that ideas about gender , sexuality, and domesticity shaped Americans' policy debates about gun violence in the late twentieth century. It will also showcase the reproductive labor done by families to care for members with firearms-related injuries.
He teaches classes on the history of American cities and suburbs (HIST3040), the Sexual Revolution and its legacies (HIST4015), modern American history (HIST2002), and U.S. history since the 1960s (HIST3016). He also teaches courses at the graduate level, including an urban history seminar (HIST7014).