Kevin M. Schultz

Currently Chair of the Department of History, Professor Schultz is an award-winning historian who teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century American history with special interests in religion and American intellectual and cultural life.  He has published widely, given numerous presentations, and has excelled as a public intellectual, academic, and teacher. He is a past president of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History and currently the Academic Chair of UIC Global.

Professor Schultz's forthcoming book, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (University of Chicago Press, 2025), tells the fascinating story of the history of modern liberalism, focusing on how its enemies have worked hard to denigrate it through attacks and caricature.  Their key move was to craft the image, often false (or at least exaggerated), of someone called "a white liberal," then attacked it mercilessly, seeking to win power through their attacks.  The attacks have come from all sides--the right, the left, civil rights advocates, and more--and they have been effective.  In the end, the book explains why so many Americans claim to believe in the principles of liberalism (freedom, equality, equal opportunity, etc.) while resisting allowing anyone to label them "a liberal."

Professor Schultz's previous books include Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped The 1960s (W.W. Norton & Co.), which was an Amazon.com #1 New Release in US History, and reviewed widely, including in The New Yorker, Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the New York Review of Books Blog, the Times of London, National Review, and more.  It told the tale of the fascinatingly intertwined lives of right-wing firebrand William F. Buckley, Jr. and left-wing radical Norman Mailer as a way to better understand the 1960s. His first academic book, Tri-Faith America: How Postwar Catholics and Jews Held America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford University Press, 2011), charted the decline of the idea that the United States was a “Christian nation” and the subsequent rise of the notion that the country was premised on a tri-faith idea that came to be called “Judeo-Christianity.”  The book showed how acceptance of America's "Judeo-Christian" premise changed the country, in places like public education, collegiate fraternities, suburbs, and the census, all during what were the supposedly conformist 1950s.

Professor Schultz has also had essays in the profession's flagship journals, including the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Labor History, as well as other distinguished outlets, both popular and academic.  His research has been sponsored by the Harry Ransom Center, the Tanner Center, and more.

A distinguished teacher, Professor Schultz has won several major awards for his teaching, including the Teaching Recognition Award from the Council for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at UIC twice and the 2012-13 Shirley A. Bill Award for Excellent Teaching, an award selected by UIC History faculty, graduate students, and majors.  Professor Schultz is also the author of HIST, a popular college-level textbook, now in its sixth edition (Cengage Learning, 6th ed. 2025, first ed. 2011).  He has appeared on the NPR show "Backstory: With the American History Guys" not once, but twice, and has made numerous appearances on C-SPAN and MSNBC.

For potential graduate students: Professor Schultz is accepting graduate students working on American history topics ranging from the late nineteenth century to today.  He particularly invites students working in religious and intellectual history, the 1960s, and American immigration.

Mailer and Buckley: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the 1960s (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2015)

Tri-Faith America: How Postwar Catholics and Jews Held America to its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

HIST (Boston, Mass.: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2012 [first ed. 2010])

“The Blessings of American Pluralism,” in Darren Dochuk and Matthew A. Sutton, ed., Faith in the Age of Obama (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015).  Presentations from this forthcoming book aired on C-SPAN, Dec. 25, 2014.

“The Irony of the Postwar Religious Revival: Catholics, Jews, and the Creation of the Naked Public Square,” in Kathleen Donohue, ed., Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 213-242.

“Everywhere and Nowhere: Religion in the Historiography of the Modern America,” co-authored with Paul Harvey, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion (March 2010), 129-62.

“Godlessness and the Scopes Trial,” in Charles T. Mathewes and Christopher McKnight Nichols, eds., Prophesies of Godlessness: The Intellectual Tradition of Secularization in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 137-53.

“The FEPC and the Legacy of the Labor-Based Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s,” Labor History (February 2008), 71-92.  ****Winner of Labor History’s Best Article by a Scholar Within Five Years of Ph.D. Completion Prize, 2008.

“‘Favoritism Cannot be Tolerated’: Challenging de facto Protestantism in America’s Public Schools and Advocating a Neutral State” American Quarterly (September 2007), pp. 565-591.

“Religion as Identity in Postwar America: The Story of the Last Serious Attempt to Put a Question on Religion in the U.S. Census,” Journal of American History (September 2006), pp. 359-84   ****Highlighted as a “notable article” in Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2007), pp. 82-3.

“The Return of Christian America?” The Huffington Post (April 11, 2011),

“The Waspish Hetero-Patriarchy: Locating Power in Recent American History,” Historically Speaking (November 2010), 8-11.

“Everywhere and Nowhere,” co-authored with Paul Harvey, Inside Higher Ed (February 18, 2010).

Recent lecture given at OSU (3/3/16)

Recent 1960s lecture for C-SPAN (4/8/15)

Recent appearance on MS-NBC (6/4/15)