Sam Lebovic

Sam Lebovic is a historian of U.S. politics, culture, civil liberties, and foreign relations. He is a professor at George Mason University, where his teaching and research focuses on the ways that democratic life and the public sphere have been shaped by capitalism and imperialism in the 20th century. He was educated at the University of Sydney and the University of Chicago and held postdoctoral fellowships at New York University and Rutgers.
His first book, Free Speech and Unfree News (Harvard, 2016), provided a new account of American press freedom in the 20th century. It argued that the right to free speech was inadequate to produce a democratic press in an era defined by corporate media consolidation and the rise of state secrecy. The book won the Paul Murphy Prize in Civil Liberties from the American Society for Legal History and the Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. His second book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cu...