Mike Wallace,
Founder & Advisory Board Chairman

Mike Wallace is Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he has taught the history of New York and crime in the city to police officers and others since 1971, and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He was born and raised in New York City and its environs, and got his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia University, studying with the Pulitzer-winning historian Richard Hofstadter, with whom he collaborated on American Violence: A Documentary History (1970). He helped found and for thirty years helped publish and edit the Radical History Review, now affiliated with Duke University Press. In 1997 he published Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (1997), a series of essays that explore the ways history is used and abused in American popular culture, including pieces on Disney World, Colonial Williamsburg, the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian and historic preservation. His 2002 book A New Deal for New York considered the future of post-9/11 New York in the light of its past.

Dr. Wallace has worked with a number of radio producers, novelists, and others to make the best new scholarship accessible to non-specialists, serving as a senior consultant for Ric Burns's New York: A Documentary Film, and advising many local museums, notably the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York. He has lectured in many parts of the country and the world.

After winning the Pulitzer for his co-authored history of New York City to 1898, Gotham (1999), Dr. Wallace has been at work continuing the project alone. The second volume, Greater Gotham (2017), carries the story through the end of World War I. A third volume is well underway.

He is married to Carmen Boullosa, one of Mexico's most acclaimed novelists, essayists, poets, and playwrights, a winner of five New York Emmys for her CUNY-TV show Nueva York, and a regular columnist for Mexico City's El Universal. The pair co-authored A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the "Mexican Drug War" ​in 2015.