His research focuses on the political and social history of twentieth-century America, particularly southern history and the United States since 1945. He teaches courses on the South since Reconstruction, the long 1960s, politics and ideology in post–World War II America, and the southern civil rights movement. He is the author of Strom Thurmond’s America (2012) and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (2007) and is a coeditor of The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (2010).