Sam Lebovic
Sam Lebovic
Professor
U.S. History: 20th century culture and politics; civil liberties; media history; foreign relations; national security; democracy; political institutions and political economy; cultural globalization, constitutional history.
Sam Lebovic is an historian of U.S. politics, media, civil liberties, and foreign relations and an expert on the history of the First Amendment. Educated at the University of Sydney and the University of Chicago, he held postdoctoral fellowships at NYU and Rutgers before coming to Mason in 2013.
He is the author of three books as well as numerous articles and book chapters exploring such diverse subjects as press freedom, national security secrecy, media economics, the regulation of passports and visas, educational exchange programs, the Espionage Act, the Beatles, spectator sport, and the politics of fake news. His writing has appeared in leading scholarly journals as well as such places as Dissent, The Boston Review, The Boston Globe, The Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Policy and Politico.
Lebovic currently serves as Co-Editor of the Journal of Social History. In this role he has edited special issues focused on the history of neoliberalism (2019) and the history of the security state (2023). In 2023-2024 he was a Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, where he helped organize a conference and collection of essays on the free speech rights of public employees.
Current Research
Lebovic is currently writing an essay entitled "Do Americans Have a Right to Know About the World?" which explores the history of legal claims by American citizens to receive information from overseas, or to travel abroad.
He is also working on a number of new projects: the politics of free speech in post-WWII America; the history of the federal bureaucracy; the long history of media empires and media barons in the U.S., UK, and Australia; efforts to regulate the advertising industry; the free speech philosophy of Harold Laski; and the career and activism of radical journalist William Worthy.
Selected Publications
Books
Free Speech and Unfree News (Harvard, 2016) provided a new account of American press freedom in the twentieth century. It argued that the right to free speech was inadequate to produce a democratic press in an era defined by corporate media consolidation and the rise of state secrecy. Free Speech and Unfree News won the Paul Murphy Prize in Civil Liberties from the American Society for Legal History and the Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (for best book on the history of politics or political economy). You can see a lecture based on this book here.
A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022. Focusing on efforts to manage the international flow of culture from the 1940s to the 1970s – educational exchange programs, international cultural institutions, visa and passport policies – it shows how the U.S. sought to export its culture at the same time that it insulated its own public sphere from foreign influence. The result, the book reveals, was a lopsided flow of international culture: the world knew more about American culture than Americans knew about the world. Understanding the contradictory structures of postwar informational flows, the book shows, helps us rethink the histories of U.S. culture, foreign policy, and globalization.
State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime, was published by Basic Books in November 2023. It is the first narrative history of this controversial law, which has been used not only to punish spies, but also to prosecute dissidents during World War One and leakers of classified information today (plus a certain ex-president). Tracing the surprising evolution of this confusing law over more than a century, the book reveals the dangers that the Espionage Act has posed, and continues to pose, to American democracy. State of Silence was named a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker and was a finalist for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award (given for outstanding work that fosters the American public’s understanding of the law and legal system). This event at the National Constitution Center provides a nice introduction to Lebovic’s work on the Espionage Act.
Articles
“Rethinking the Origins of National Security Classification,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 54, no.2 (June 2024): 259-270
“Of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Correspondents,” Modern American History, 7, no.1 (March 2024): 141-146
"Introduction: Social Histories of the Security State," Journal of Social History, 56, no.3 (Spring 2023): 521-532
"Fake News, Lies and Other Familiar Problems," Knight First Amendment Institute, November 2022 (Republished in The Journal of Free Speech Law 4, no.2 (2023))
“The Conservative Press and the Interwar Origins of First Amendment Lochnerism,” Law and History Review 39, no.3 (August 2021): 539-567
“The Politics of Pluralism: Debating Media Diversity in Australia, c.1976,” Australian Historical Studies 51, no.4 (October 2020): 401-419
“No Right to Leave the Nation: The Politics of Passport Denial and the Rise of the National Security State,” Studies in American Political Development 34, no.1 (April 2020): 170-193
Expanded Publication List
Grants and Fellowships
Lebovic has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the George Mason Center for Humanities Research, the National Library of Australia, the LMU-Munich Center for Global History, the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center at NYU, and the Truman Institute.
Courses Taught
Graduate: Cultural Globalization, History of the U.S. State, Global Migrations, American Internationalism, U.S. National Security State, American Democracy, U.S. and the Pacific World, The Culture Industries.
Undergraduate: History of the American Media, Free Speech and Censorship, The U.S. and World Power, Cold War America, Introduction to World History.
Dissertations Supervised
Justin Broubalow, “To Properly and Humanely Enforce the Laws”: US Immigration Policy and the Associational State, 1882–1941 (2025)
Brandan Buck, Partisans of the Old Republic: Right-Wing Opposition to U.S. Foreign Policy (2024)