He received his BA from Williams College and his PhD in history from Columbia University. Professor Cannato teaches courses on New York City history, Boston history, immigration history, and twentieth-century American history. He is the author of American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009) and The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (Basic Books, 2001), and co-editor of Living in the Eighties (Oxford University Press, 2009). Professor Cannato has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New Republic. He is a member of the Advisory Council of Historians and Scholars for the American Institute for History Education. He has also received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.