// Workers AI · dad joke modeIs Michael Flamm a fire fighter? Flamm-ing yes.

Michael William Flamm (born April 10, 1964) is an American historian and author best known for his work on post-1945 United States political history, particularly the politics of street crime and civil unrest as well as the tensions between liberalism and conservatism. He was a professor of history at Ohio Wesleyan University for twenty-five years and has served as a lecturer at The Ohio State University since 2024. He is the author of Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (2005), In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of the 1964 and the War on Crime (2016), and a co-author of Debating the 1960s (2007).

Life and education

Flamm was born in New York City and raised in Northfield, Minnesota, where he became an avid fan of the Vikings, Twins, and Timberwolves. He completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard University in 1986, graduating magna cum laude with a B.A. in History. He then pursued graduate studies at Columbia University, earning a Ph.D. in History in 1998.

Career

After receiving his B.A. from Harvard, Flamm taught U.S. history and government at Rumson‑Fair Haven High School (NJ) from 1986 to 1989 and Scarsdale High School, New York from 1989 to 1991. From 1992 to 1996 he served as a teaching assistant at Columbia University. He then joined the History Department at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he taught from 1998 to 2023 as he rose from assistant to full professor. He became a lecturer at The Ohio State University in 2024.

Flamm was elected in 2019 to a three-year term on the executive board of the Organization of American Historians. He has also served on various committees and consulted for the National Endowment for the Humanities, College Board, and National Academy of Sciences.

Research and Scholarship

Flamm specializes in post‑1945 U.S. political history. His publications include Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (2005); Debating the 1960s: Liberal, Conservative, and Radical Perspectives (2007, co-edited with David Steigerwald); Debating the Reagan Presidency (2009, co-authored with John Ehrman); The Chicago Handbook for Teachers: A Practical Guide to the College Classroom (2011, co-authored with Alan Brinkley et al.); and In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (2017).

In addition to more than thirty scholarly articles and book reviews in journals such as American Historical Review, Reviews in American History, and the Journal of Policy History, Flamm has contributed chapters to edited volumes and created How 1954 Changed History (2020), an Audible Original.