THOMAS J. SUGRUE is David Boies Professor of History and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of  Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race and  Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, the first full-scale history of the black freedom struggle in the North. Sweeping in scope and scale, it spans the period from 1920 to the present. 

Sugrue is an accomplished historian and writer.  His book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in History, the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association, and the Best Book in North American Urban History of the Urban History Association. In 2005, Princeton University Press selected Origins as one of the 100 most influential books it published in its first century. Sugrue writes on American politics, civil rights, public policy, urban history, and religion.