Claude S. Fischer is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He is the co-author with Michael Hout of Century of Difference: How American Changed in the Last One Hundred Years and the author of Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press). Fischer received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York.