Historian Tim Keogh will give a lecture on his book In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb at the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum – on Thursday, October 10, at 7:00 pm. His book takes a nuanced look at the history of suburban development and its connection to impoverished living conditions on Long Island.
“This forgotten part of Long Island’s past is one that continues to shape the Island’s current job and housing challenges,” Keogh said.
In Levittown’s Shadow (The University of Chicago Press, 2023), he examines the familiar narrative about American suburbs – after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. Keogh’s research reveals that there is more to this story. He offers an eye-opening account of diverse, poor residents living and working in those same neighborhoods. Keogh shows how public policies produced both suburban plenty and deprivation—and why ignoring suburban poverty doomed efforts to reduce inequality.
Tim Keogh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Queensborough Community College. He earned an A.A. degree from Nassau Community College (2005), a B.A. in History from Hofstra University (2007), and M.A. degree in History from Hunter College (2010), and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize for best manuscript in New York history. He is the editor of War and the City: The Urban Context of Conflict and Mass Destruction and his published work can be found in The New Republic, Nonsite, Journal of Urban History, and Journal of Planning Education and Research, among others. He is a Long Island native, and currently lives there with his wife and children.