He has also taught at California State University, Sacramento, the University of California, Berkeley, and Heidelberg University. An historian of American political thought, he is the author of a history of the original Populist movement of the 1890s entitled The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2007), which received the Bancroft Prize in History and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. His present book project is a new interpretative work on the post-Civil War reform movements that culminated in the Progressive Era. He is also researching conservatism and the historical origins of the Tea Party movement. Charles Postel earned both his B.A. in history (1995) and his Ph.D. in history (2002) from the University of California, Berkeley.