Kim Phillips-Fein is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She writes about the creation and decline of New Deal liberalism, the rise of conservative politics in the post–World War II United States, the politics of business, and social and political movements that address economic issues and ideas. She is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (2009) and Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017). With Julian Zelizer, she is a coeditor of What's Good for Business: Business and American Politics Since World War II (2012). She has written for a wide range of scholarly and popular publications, including the Journal of American History, Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas, The Nation, and the New York Times.
This lecture looks at the fiscal crisis in New York City in 1975 as a way of thinking about the broader changes in political life in the 1970s and after.