Brent Cebul is the Mellon Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond and an associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is the author of Developmental State: Business, Poverty, and Economic Empowerment from the New Deal to the New Democrats and is at work on a book tentatively titled Bootstraps Nation: A History of Self Help in Modern America. He is the editor of Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century.
The quest for personal authenticity and autonomy in the face of unreliable communities and institutions has become a defining feature of the modern working class.