Amy B. Bridges

Amy B. Bridges is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. A scholar of city politics, Bridges is the author of A City in the Republic, Antebellum New York and Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge, 1984) and Morning Glories, Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton, 1997), which won two awards for best book published in 1997, Best Book in Urban Politics from the Urban Politics section of the APSA, and Best Book in North American Urban History from the Urban History Association.   Bridges also co-edited, with Michael Javen Fortner, Urban Citizenship and American Democracy, the Historical and Institutional Roots of Local Politics and PublicPolicy  (State University of New York Press,  2015), and Democratic Beginnings, Founding the Western States (University Press of Kansas, 2015) an account of the founding constitutional conventions of the eleven western states, and the constitutions they wrote.  I argue that their deliberations, from California in 1940 to New Mexico and Arizona in 1910, trace debates about politics and economics in the far west from the antebellum years to the election of Woodrow Wilson, the height of the Progressive Era. Bridges has served on the editorial boards of Politics & Society, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Policy History, and Studies in American Political Development. Persuaded that for too long political scientists and historians have neglected the western region, Bridges is currently writing a book about the founding constitutions of the eleven western states, Western Window, Constitutions, Politics, and Growth. Her research earned Bridges fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1980

American Politics, Urban Politics

Curriculum Vitae