Kenneth T. Jackson (b. 1939) is a professor of history and social sciences at Columbia University. A frequent television guest, he is best known as an urban historian and a preeminent authority on New York City, where he lives on the Upper West Side.

Biographical details

Jackson was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He earned his B.A. in 1961 at the University of Memphis, followed by his Ph.D. in 1966 at the University of Chicago. He served as an assistant professor for the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base from 1965 to 1968. He then joined the Columbia faculty in 1968, earning his tenure in 1970. His first widely acclaimed work was the book Crabgrass Frontier, a comprehensive study of the factors that influenced the development of suburbs in the United States.

His most famous published work is The Encyclopedia of New York City, for which he served as editor-in-chief. It was a massive tome which reputedly took 13 years to edit and was published in 1995 by Yale University Press. He is also well known for his devotion to teaching, earning many accolades from Columbia University including designation as the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and Social Sciences and the Mark van Doren award for excellence in teaching. His place in Columbia history is secure, thanks to his wildly popular lecture course, "The History of the City of New York", and its well known annual all-night bike ride from Morningside Heights in Manhattan to the Promenade in Brooklyn.

Jackson has served in various groups that advance the pursuits of history, including the Bradley Commission on History in Schools, the Urban History Association, the Society of American Historians, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Council for History Education.

In 1999 he served as a consultant and appeared in New York: A Documentary Film, produced by Ric Burns. In 2001, he was named New York Council for the Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2001, Jackson became the president of the New-York Historical Society, on the condition that his responsibilities would not preclude his teaching activities.

Selected works

• The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (1967)
• Cities in American History (1972)
• Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)
• Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (1990), with Camilo Vergara
• The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995), (ed.)
• Empire City (2002), (ed.), with David Dunbar (ed.)

See also

• Robert Caro
• Jane Jacobs
• Mike Wallace

External links

• Columbia University: Kenneth T. Jackson (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/history/htm/h_faculty_profile_kjackson.htm)
• New York State Writers Institute: Kenneth T. Jackson (http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/jackson_kenneth.html)
• PBS: Interview with Kenneth T. Jackson (http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/jackson.htm)