Dr. Rebecca Marchiel is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi.
Research Interests
Dr. Marchiel's research interests include the relationship between financial institutions and ordinary people in the United States, the rise of an affordable housing policy regime in the 20th century, and housing discrimination and financial exploitation in the era after civil rights victories.
Biography
Dr. Marchiel is an historian of urban history, political history, and the history of American capitalism. In 2020, she published her first book, “After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation.” She is currently writing a book that explores the emergence of “affordable housing” as a policy priority in the late 20th century. Marchiel taught U.S. history at Franklin and Marshall College for one year before joining the UM faculty in 2015.
Publications
The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation
From the publisher:
Focusing on Chicago’s West Side, After Redlining illuminates how urban activists were able to change banks’ behavior to support investment in communities that they had once abandoned.
American banks, to their eternal discredit, long played a key role in disenfranchising nonwhite urbanites and, through redlining, blighting the very city neighborhoods that needed the most investment. Banks long showed little compunction in aiding and abetting blockbusting, discrimination, and outright theft from nonwhites. They denied funds to entire neighborhoods or actively exploited them, to the benefit of suburban whites—an economic white flight to sharpen the pain caused by the demographic one.
Selected Article(s):
"The Keys to Ensuring a New Anti-Redlining Initiative Succeeds,” Washington Post, November 15, 2021.
"Urban Decline: The Staying Power of a Postwar Story," Journal of Urban History, June 20, 2018.
Courses Taught
- HIST 1310 Intro to US History Since 1877
- HIST 4090 US History Since 1974
- HIST 4320 US Economic History
- HIST 4900 The American Consumer
- HIST 4910 The Vietnam War
- HIST 5060 Historiography of US Since Reconstruction
- HIST 6060 Readings in US Civil War to Present
Education
M.A. History, Northwestern University (2008)
Ph.D. History, Northwestern University (2014)
Recognitions
- Fellowship, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center,, 2015-2016