Narrating Histories of Wealth and Poverty in America’s Second Gilded Age

The presenter will discuss the process of writing his forthcoming book, which weaves together the stories of wealthy, all-white homeowners along the Connecticut shore and impoverished, heavily minority neighborhoods in the state’s urban centers to tell the history of land-based exclusion, racial segregation, and wealth inequality in America’s most unequal state. At the center of the story is a highly controversial, combative social activist, who spent over a decade fighting to open the state’s highly exclusive—and thoroughly privatized—shoreline to the urban poor. The presenter will discuss the challenges of writing a history of the recent past, and of a person who touched so many nerves, and burned so many bridges, over the course of his remarkable life.