Profile:

Timothy Messer-Kruse received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  In 1995 he joined the history department at the University of Toledo where he served as chair from 2003 to 2005 and was recognized with the university’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2003.  In 2006 he was appointed chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at Bowling Green State University.

While his area of specialization is in the field of U.S. Labor History, he has published on a diverse array of subjects including race relations, the Chinese Exclusion movement, the culture of the Ku Klux Klan, the history of weights and measures, technology and child labor, the invention of auto racing, art and industrial design, and radical social movements.  His first book, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876. (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) unearthed previously unknown connections between the abolitionist, women’s rights, and socialist movements in America.  His detailed study of the largest Depression-era bank failure, Banksters, Bosses and Smart Money (Ohio State University Press, 2005), appeared several years before history repeated itself in 2008.

Recently his study of race and culture in the 1980s, Race Relations in the United States, 1980-2000 (Greenwood Press, June 2008), was the final volume in a five-volume series of American ethnic history.  His most recent work draws on new evidence to revise our understanding of the famed Haymarket Bombing in Chicago in 1886.  Out of this research he has written two books, the recently released The Haymarket Trial: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks which will be published by the University of Illinois Press in early 2012.

Prof. Messer-Kruse is also an avid long-distance runner, competing in two marathons a year, and has qualified for the Boston Marathon for seven times.  

Education:

Ph.D. in History, University of Wisconsin-Madison