Tammy Ingram

Associate Professor

Tammy Ingram is a historian of the twentieth-century U.S. She received her PhD from Yale University in 2007 and began teaching at the College of Charleston in 2011. She is also an affiliate in the Urban Studies Program, Crime, Law, & Society and Women's & Gender Studies and serves on the Faculty Advisory Board for the Southern Studies minor at the College of Charleston.

Professor Ingram’s new book project, The Wickedest City in America: The Rise and Fall of Organized Crime in the Jim Crow South, is under contract with Harvard University Press. The book examines criminal enterprise, government corruption, and challenges to the sexual and racial order in the Jim Crow South. The book focuses on a sophisticated organized crime syndicate in Phenix City, Alabama, a small town along the Chattahoochee River, but it surveys the full scope of crime and corruption in the South and beyond from the early twentieth century through the 1950s. Professor Ingram recently served as the Robina Fellow in Modern Slavery at the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale where she also taught a seminar in the history department. Her GLC podcast about The Wickedest City is available here.

Ingram’s first book, Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930,was published by the University of North Carolina Press in March 2014 and reissued in paperback in 2016. It is the first book about the construction of the nation’s very first interstate highway system, a largely forgotten 6000-mile network of roads that looped from Lake Michigan to Miami Beach and back up again. The book examines the literal and figurative linkages between urban and rural communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and shows how the frenzied campaign to build the Dixie Highway using federal grants, state gasoline taxes, and county chain gangs helped to shape modern transportation policy. By looking at the tensions embedded in the formation of that policy, Dixie Highway helps to explain some of the partisan debates that surround infrastructure projects today. The book received awards from the Georgia Historical Society and the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council and was named a 2014 Book of Interest by the Business History Conference.

In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Ingram has contributed essays and op-eds to publications such as H-Net, the Huffington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Like the Dew. Click here for links to some of her essays, interviews, podcasts, and televised lectures. She is a past Chair of the American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBTQ Status in the Profession and currently serves on the board of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association.

Professor Ingram teaches courses in modern U.S. political and social history and southern history, including The U.S. and the World in the American Century, Crime and Punishment in America, The Modern South, Film and History, The U.S. Since 1945, and Race and Rebellion in America. She also teaches graduate seminars on U.S. politics and the post-Civil War South.

Education

Ph.D Yale University, 2007

M.A. Yale University, 2003

M.A. University of Georgia, 2000

B.A. University of Georgia, 1998