Join Boston College historian Michael Glass for a conversation about his new book, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America. The book explores how home mortgages and municipal bonds helped build postwar suburbs while also making them financially fragile, and how these tools entrenched disparities that still shape American life today.

Lunch will be served and registration is required to attend.

Michael Glass is an Assistant Professor of History at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and previously worked as a public high school teacher in New York City. A political and urban historian of twentieth-century America, his work focuses on the intersections of race, metropolitan development, and capitalism.

His research examines how financial systems—such as credit markets, property taxes, and home insurance—generate inequality and shape everyday life, from housing and education to environmental risk. By making complex economic and policy systems tangible, his writing reveals their human consequences and historical roots.

In discussion with Glass is Lizabeth Cohen. Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Research Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at Harvard. From 2011-18 she was the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, which won the 2020 Bancroft Prize in American History, previous books include Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, also winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer, and A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.

She is also co-author with David Kennedy and Margaret O’Mara of a widely used college and advanced placement United States history textbook, The American Pageant. Her writings have appeared as well in many edited volumes, academic journals, and popular venues, including The Atlantic, New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the American Prospect.