Faculty Profile

Michael Grossberg

Sally M. Reahard Professor of History and Professor of Law

Biography

Professor Grossberg is the Sally M. Reahard Professor of History and an adjunct professor of law at Indiana University. He is also co-director of the IU Center for Law, Society, and Culture. His research focuses on the relationship between law and social change, particularly the intersection of law and the family. He is the author of a number of books and articles on legal and social history, and his 1985 book, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America, won the Littleton-Griswold Prize in the History of Law and Society in America given by the American Historical Association. Grossberg also published A Judgment for Solomon: The d'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America in 1996 and a co-edited volume, American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, in 2003. Grossberg has been involved in a number of public policy research projects, including a current project designed to devise guidelines for genetic testing in child custody cases.

He is currently working on a study of child protection in the United States that will assess issues such as child labor, juvenile justice, school reform, disabilities, and child abuse from the 1870s to the present. He is also co-editing the Cambridge History of Law in the United States, a three-volume collection of articles analyzing the central substantive and methodological developments in American legal history from the colonial period to the present. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Newberry Library, and the American Bar Foundation, and he has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. He teaches courses in American legal and social history in the IU College of Arts and Sciences and at Indiana Law.

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Selected Works

• Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth Century America (Studies in Legal History, University of North Carolina Press, l985); Paperback edition, 1988; Second paperback edition, 1993; Electronic Edition, 2002
• A Judgment for Solomon: The d'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 1996); simultaneous publication in hardback and paperback
• American Public Life and the Historical Imagination (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); edited with Wendy Gamber and Hendrik Hartog, and published simultaneously in hardback and paperback.
• Cambridge History of Law in America (Cambridge University Press), 3 vols; co-edited with Christopher Tomlins; forthcoming spring 2008
• "Giving the Present a Past? Family Law in the United States, 1950-2000," in Sanford N. Katz, John M. Eekleaar, and Mavis Mclean eds. Cross Currents: Anglo-American Family Law, 1950-2000 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 2001)
• "A Protected Childhood: The Emergence of Child Protection in America," in Wendy Gamber, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik Hartog eds. American Public Life and the Historical Imagination (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 213-39.
• "Duped Dads and Discarded Children: A Historical Perspective on DNA Testing in Child Custody Cases," in Mark Rothstein et al., eds. Genetic Ties and the Family, The Impact of Paternity Testing on Parents and Children (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 97-131

Related Links

• Department of History profile
• Publications