Office Hours
Spring 2024: Fridays, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Education
Ph.D. – Columbia University 2012
M.S. – Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism 2002
B.A. – Vassar College 1999
Interests and Research
Thai Jones studies radical social movements, New York City history, and Environmental History in the United States. He is the author of three books, including More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York's Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2014 [2012]), which rediscovered a forgotten political crisis that roiled New York City in the early twentieth century. His first book, A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004), explored his own family’s long history of political dissent against the backdrop of twentieth century social movements. He is currently working on Boomtown, a history of labor and the environment in Progressive Era gold-mining communities. Before becoming Lehman Curator, Jones was an assistant professor of history at the Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching Program. Formerly a reporter for Newsday, his writings have appeared in a variety of national publications, including the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Nation, and the Occupied Wall Street Journal.
Courses
- Columbia University and Slavery
- The Sixties in the Archive
- Climate Change and Social History
- Labor, Nature, and Capital
- Senior Thesis Seminar (Barnard College)
- American Environment History (Barnard College)
- The History of Capitalism in the Archives
Affiliations
- Senior editor, American Communist History
- Reviews editor, International Labor and Working-Class History
Publications
Books
Boomtown: An Environmental and Labor history of Gold Mining (Harvard University Press, expected 2022)
My Midnight Years, Surviving Jon Burge's Police Torture Ring and Death Row, with Ronald Kitchen and Logan M. McBride (Chicago Review Press, 2018)
More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York's Year of Anarchy(Bloomsbury, 2014)
A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004)
Selected Articles
“Slavery reparations seem impossible. In many places, they’re already happening,” Washington Post (2020)
“How Chicago’s Public Schools Are Teaching The History Of Police Torture,” The New Yorker (2018)
“Un-Athenian Affairs: I.F. Stone, M.I. Finley, and the Trial of Socrates,” in William V. Harris, ed., M.I. Finley and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2013)
“From Tsarist Russia to Zuccotti Park, The Paradox of Anarchism,” The Forward (2011)
“All Day, All Week (All Century), Occupy Wall Street,” The Occupied Wall Street Journal (2011)
“Two, Three, Many Columbias,” The New York Times (2008)
Publications
Books
Boomtown: An Environmental and Labor history of Gold Mining (Harvard University Press, expected 2017)
More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York's Year of Anarchy(Bloomsbury, 2014 [2012])
A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004)
Selected Articles
“Un-Athenian Affairs: I.F. Stone, M.I. Finley, and the Trial of Socrates,” in William V. Harris, ed., M.I. Finley and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2013)
“From Tsarist Russia to Zuccotti Park, The Paradox of Anarchism,” The Forward (2011)
“All Day, All Week (All Century), Occupy Wall Street,” The Occupied Wall Street Journal (2011)
“Two, Three, Many Columbias,” The New York Times (2008)
Columbia University