Books:
Where Texas Meets the Sea: Corpus Christi and Its History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. [San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award, 2017]
editor with Thomas Welskopp. Fractured Modernity: America Confronts Modern Times, 1890s-1940s. München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012.
with Catherine Cocks and Peter Holloran. Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009.
editor with Christof Mauch. Adolf Cluss, Architect: From Germany to America. New York and Washington: Berghahn Books and Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 2005. German edition: Adolf Cluss, Revolutionär und Architekt: Von Heilbronn nach Washington. Heilbronn: Stadtarchiv Heilbronn, 2005. [Henry-Russell Hitchcock Prize, Victorian Society in America, 2006]
with William Otton and Amy Smith Kight. Legacy: A History of the Art Museum of South Texas. Corpus Christi: Art Museum of South Texas, 1997.
The Nation and Its City: Politics, “Corruption,” and Progress in Washington, D.C., 1861-1902. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. [A Choice “Outstanding Academic Book,” 1994]
Selected Articles and Chapters:
“The Texas Coast: Ship Channel Network of the Petroleum Age,” Urban Planning 8, n. 3
(2023): 330-345.
“’Leur moralité est celle de leur entourage’: Le bossisme américain et la conception outre-Atlantique de la corruption urbaine moderne.” Maudire le ville: Socio-histoire comparée de la dénonciation de la corruption urbaine. Ed. Nicolas Maisetti and Cesare Mattina. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Septentrion, 2021. Pp. 45-81.
“Lewis Mumford, Thomas Welskopp, and the Art of the Usable Past.” Entbehrung und Erfüllung: Praktiken von Arbeit, Körper und Konsum in der Geschichte moderner Gesellschaften. Ed. Gleb Albert, Daniel Siemens, and Frank Wolff. Bonn: Dietz, 2021. Pp. 431-46.
“Urban History and the Transnational Perspective.” Yearbook of Transnational History 3 (2020): 179-213.
“James Bryce, William T. Stead, and the Trans-Atlantic Meaning of the American City.” International Journal of Regional and Local History 14, n. 2 (Nov. 2019): 76-93.
“Art and Architecture.” A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. ed. Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017. Pp. 151-64.
“The Gilded Age City in American Political Discourse and Lore.” Stadt—Macht—Korruption. ed. Jens-Ivo Engels, et al. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017. Pp. 143-54.
with James J. Connolly. “From Political Insult to Political Theory: The Boss, the Machine, and the Pluralist City,” Journal of Policy History 25, n. 2 (Spring 2013): 139-72.
Current Projects:
Unbuilt Buildings, Defeated Developments, and Failed Plans in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. Curator of McLean County Museum of History exhibition, accompanied by a book and other writing.
The Texas Petroleumscape and the Urban-Industrial Heritage of Oil and Gas. Part of a transnational project on port cities and the petroleum industry, connected urban planning history program at the TU-Delft and to PortCityFutures (www.portcityfutures.nl/home). Articles along with presentations.
“Usable Pasts.” Articles and perhaps a book built around the historical thought of Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks.
“Charles Ives’s America,” NEH-sponsored “Music Unwound” festival to mark Ives’s sesquicentennial. Coordinating activities at Illinois State University, Feb. 2025. Scheduled participant in “Ives at 150” event at Indiana University, Oct. 2024.