History & Art History

Zachary Schrag received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2002 and joined the Department of History and Art History in 2004. Schrag studies U.S. cities, technology, and public policy in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

Schrag's first book, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006. The book argues that Metro can only be understood in the political context from which it was born: the Great Society liberalism of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. Metro emerged from a period when mericans believed in public investments suited to the grandeur and dignity of the world's richest nation. Metro was built not merely to move commuters, but in the words of Lyndon Johnson, to create “a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

Schrag's second book, Rules Against Research: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965 to the Present, is under contract to Johns Hopkins. The book explores the history of the regulation of social science research, showing that regulators bluntly imposed structures developed for biomedical research rather than investigating the rights and responsibilities of social scientists. While medical and psychological researchers shaped the current rules, scholars in the social sciences and the humanities were never accorded comparable respect and freedom. Schrag tracks current events and scholarship in this area on his Institutional Review Blog: http://www.institutionalreviewblog.com/.

Schrag is now working on a third book, The Militia and the Mob, which will trace the involvement of American militia and National Guard units in urban rioting from the 1790s to the present. Though riot control constituted one of the main missions of the militia, especially between 1830 and 1970, militia and Guard commanders were reluctant to acknowledge this role and often failed to prepare for riot duty. The book will ask what Americans wanted from their militia when they summoned it to the streets, and how well the militia met those expectations. In the first half of 2009, Schrag is working on this project as a Kluge fellow at the Library of Congress.

Schrag is the editor of Washington History, the journal of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. He is also serving as the guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Policy HIstory on human subjects regulations, to be published in 2011. He also blogs at Institutional Review Blog.

Post-1945 U.S. history. Urban history, including city planning, the vernacular landscape, the Washington metropolitan area, and urban riots. The history of technology, especially urban technologies and public policy debates. Human subjects regulations.