• Academics
• BRANDEIS HOME

Title

Professor of History

Degree

Ph.D., University of Chicago

Field of Specialty

United States social and political history, with special interests in legal history, urban history, and the Progressive Era (1890-1920).

Contact Information

Olin-Sang American Civilization Center 217
781-736-2292
willrich@brandeis.edu

Michael Willrich

Michael Willrich has been teaching at Brandeis since 1999. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on American political and legal history (from the colonial period to the present), crime and punishment, social politics, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the literature of American history.
Professor Willrich's current research centers on the many ways that ordinary Americans used the law--legal ideas, institutions, and litigation--to challenge the expanding scale and scope of government social intervention during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Willrich's new book, POX: AN AMERICAN HISTORY was published by the Penguin Press in April 2011. The book tells the story of the great wave of smallpox epidemics that struck America and its overseas territories around the turn of the twentieth century, spurring the growth of modern public health authority, and engendering widespread social and legal opposition to the government policy of compulsory vaccination.

Publications

Willrich, Michael. ""Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930" (Website Review)." Journal of American History vol. 99 March 2013: 1333-1334.

Willrich, Michael. "“A Scar Nobly Got”." The Scientist July 2011.

Willrich, Michael. "Why Parents Fear the Needle." New York Times January 21, 2011: Op-Ed A 27.

Willrich, Michael. POX: AN AMERICAN HISTORY. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.

Willrich, Michael. "'The Least Vaccinated of Any Civilized Country': Personal Liberty and Public Health in the Progressive Era." Journal of Policy History 20. 1 (WINTER 2008) (2008).

Willrich, Michael. "Chapter 6: Criminal Justice in the United States." The Cambridge History of American Law. vol. 3 Ed. Christopher L. Tomlins and Michael Grossberg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 195-231.

Willrich, Michael. "Urbanism is History: A Review Essay." Connecticut History 44. Spring 2005 (2005): 154-157.

Willrich, Michael. "'Close That Place of Hell': Poor Women and the Cultural Politics of Prohibition." Journal of Urban History 29. (2003).

Willrich, Michael. "Boyz to Men . . . And Back Again?: Revisiting a Forgotten Experiment in Juvenile Justice." Judicature 86. (2003): 258-262.

Willrich, Michael. "Dickering for Justice: Power, Interests, and the Plea Bargaining Juggernaut." Reviews in American History 31. (2003).

Willrich, Michael. "The Case for Courts: Law and Political Development in the Progressive Era." The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History., 2003

Willrich, Michael. City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Willrich, Michael. "Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America." Journal of American History 87. (2000): 460-489.

Willrich, Michael. "The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900-1930." Law and History Review 16. (1998): 63-111.

Courses Taught