Daniel Rowe

Dan is a third year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford. In his doctoral thesis, ‘Fighting Rust: The Long Economic Crisis and the Rebuilding of the Northeast and Midwest’, Dan explores the political and economic forces that helped transform the Northeast and the Midwest from industrial to post-industrial during the 1970s and 1980s.

Chronicling the efforts that members of the business community, labor unions, community activists and elected officials (local and national) made to help struggling industries and geographic regions negotiate the shifting economic terrain between 1974 and 1988 Dan examines the interlinked histories of urban decline, deindustrialisation, and economic development. By thoroughly examining the political environment of the 1970s and 1980s from a local and regional level Dan hopes to challenge the assumption that the economic success of the 1990s was produced by the limited government and free market policies of the Reagan administration or the ingenuity of individual entrepreneurs.