Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is an American historian, specializing in the politics and culture of the modern United States. She is a professor of history at The New School. Petrzela is also a history communicator who frequently writes pieces about American history in popular media outlets, co-hosts the Past Present podcast, and has created or been featured in educational videos for The History Channel and C-SPAN.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsThe New School

Education and positions

Petrzela attended Columbia University, graduating with a BA degree in history in 2000.[1] She began to work as an investment banking analyst, and then in 2001 she became a Spanish teacher[1] at a public school in New York City.[2] After a year, she attended graduate school at Stanford University, where she obtained an MA in history in 2004 and a PhD in history in 2009.[1] After graduating in 2009, she joined the history faculty at The New School.[1]

Research

In 2015, Petrzela published the book Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture.[3] In Classroom Wars, Petrzela studies the controversies over the inclusion of sex education and Spanish language bilingual education in California schools from the mid-1960s through the 1980s.[4] She connects these issues to the popular sentiment against property tax in California and the state's rightward trend during the 1970s, culminating in the passage of the 1978 California Proposition 13.[5] Classroom Wars is divided into two sections, with the first detailing the fight over sex education and the second devoted to the fight over Spanish language education, and employs primary sources that include newspapers, lesson plans, school board minutes, and course evaluations.[6] Within each section, the book is largely structured as a chronology of the fight over these educational topics, but also includes micro-history analyses in California communities including Anaheim, San Francisco, San Jose, and San Mateo.[7] Classroom Wars was particularly noted for combining two subjects that might appear to be dissimilar, namely sex education and Spanish language education,[8] in contrast to the large proportion of the scholarship on American education in the 1960s and 1970s that has been characterised as focusing narrowly on major individual topics in the context of school desegregation with less attention to how those topics interact with each other.[5] Classroom Wars was published in a paperback edition in 2017.[9]

As of 2020, Petrzela has a second book under contract, called Fit Nation: How America Embraced Exercise as the Government Abandoned It.[1]

Public communication

Petrzela has engaged in substantial public communication about topics in American history. Since 2015, Petrzela has hosted the weekly podcast Past Present with the historians Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young, which discusses recent events in American politics in the context of American political history.[10] She was the creator and presenter[11] of The History Channel's 2018 webseries, "The Unlikely History of Everyday Things".[1]

Petrzela regularly contributes pieces to media outlets including The Atlantic,[12] The New York Times,[13] and The Washington Post.[14] She is frequently interviewed and quoted in media outlets including The New York Times,[15] GloboNews,[16] El Mundo,[17] and The BBC.[18] Petrzela was featured in the C-SPAN Lectures in history series.[19]

Petrzela is also involved in fitness and athletics companies, both in the workout company intenSati and as a co-founder of HealthClass2.0.[1]

She is the host of the forthcoming podcast series Welcome to Your Fantasy, about the history of Chippendales.[20]

References
  1. "Natalia Mehlman Petrzela profile". The New School. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  2. Mehlman, Natalia (24 June 2002). "My Brief Teaching Career". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  3. Hartman, Andrew (1 October 2015). "Review Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture". H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
  4. Norland, D. L. (1 September 2015). "Review Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture". CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53 (1): 124.
  5. Brilliant, Mark (August 2016). "Review Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture". History of Education Quarterly. 56 (3): 505–508. doi:10.1111/hoeq.12201.
  6. Pierce, Jennifer Burek (1 June 2016). "Review Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture". American Historical Review. 121 (3): 995. doi:10.1093/ahr/121.3.995.
  7. Blanton, Carlos Kevin (March 2016). "Review Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture". The Journal of American History. 102 (4): 1268–1269. doi:10.1093/jahist/jav734. S2CID 148744822.
  8. Schreiber, Catherina (2017). "Review Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 26 (2): 335–337.
  9. Estruth, Jeannette (1 November 2017). "Review Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture". Southern California Quarterly. 99 (4): 486–488. doi:10.1525/scq.2017.99.4.486.
  10. "Past Present". Public Seminar. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  11. "Did Summer Camps Save Kids from Factories?". The History Channel, YouTube. 5 March 2018. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  12. "All stories by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela". The Atlantic. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  13. Mehlman Petrzela, Natalia (12 May 2020). "Jogging Has Always Excluded Black People". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  14. Mehlman Petrzela, Natalia (31 January 2019). "The fitness industry is booming. So why are P.E. classes disappearing?". The Washington Post. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  15. Mehlman Petrzela, Natalia (11 November 2017). "Where Are All the Nannies on Instagram?". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  16. "Nos EUA, mulheres protestaram contra a desigualdade no mercado de trabalho". GloboNews (in Portuguese). 8 March 2020. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  17. García Marcos, Gema (22 April 2020). "Historia del fitness casero: de los métodos para potenciar la virilidad a Jane Fonda, Eva Nasarre, Cindy Crawford y los instagramers". El Mundo (in Spanish). Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  18. Lufkin, Bryan (4 May 2020). "The evolution of home fitness". The BBC. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  19. "1980s Fitness Industry and Culture". C-SPAN. 14 April 2020. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  20. @nataliapetrzela (22 June 2020). "For a year+ I've been working w @pineapplemedia on a podcast that hits all my passions..." (Tweet) – via Twitter.
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