Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Cold War Civil Rights 2.0

A new edition of my first book, Cold War Civil Rights:  Race and the Image of American Democracy, is just out from Princeton University Press.  If you are a graduate student interested in civil rights during the Cold War era, I wrote the new preface for you!  Here's the Amazon link.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Available for Spring Course Adoptions

The official release date for War Time is February 6, 2012, but books should ship early enough for spring course adoptions.  (Books usually start to ship about a month before the pub. date.)

I've received queries about this, so I asked the press about what to tell teachers who want to assign the book for spring 2012 courses.  OUP advises that you place pre-orders with OUP.  That way copies will ship to you as soon as copies are available.  I'll post updates about this on the blog closer to the release date.

In the meantime, if you need more information about the book, please take a look at this site, which will be updated as more book information is available. Also, you might find it helpful to read the essay that led to the book, which can be downloaded for free from this site.  The book goes well beyond the essay, of course, and is written in a way that will (I hope) appeal to a broader readership than the law review essay.

If you need more information, please contact me.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Teaching 9/11

As the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks nears, and as teachers and scholars try again to make sense of it all, it might be helpful to look back at what happened in classrooms across the country ten years ago.  Here is a snippet from my Forward to a new issue of the Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, September 11:  Ten Years After, which has just been published.  For this excerpt, I relied on materials at the September 11 Digital Archive.  I draw from the same sources in chapter 4 of War Time.
In classrooms across the country on September 11, 2001, lesson plans were abruptly abandoned. Students and teachers gathered around televisions, sharing the sense that “history” was being made before their eyes. Patricia Latessa, a Cincinnati high school teacher, turned on the cafeteria television “and watched history unfold.” She reflected as she watched about how the scenes of airplanes flying into buildings would impact her students. “The world they knew was bifurcated, cut in half, a time before and a time after”. An unsettling day seemed to require upsetting usual practices. The British Literature teacher at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, in Omaha, Nebraska, burst into a French class during an exam, and turned on the television. At another high school, the principal ordered that the televisions be turned off at midday. Colin Riebel later recalled: “We, the students, revolted. We argued this was a huge part of our history and we had a right to know what was happening to our country. The school complied and let us watch the news again”.
Continue reading here.  Cross-posted from the Legal History Blog.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Forthcoming February 2012

War Time:  An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in February 2012.  You can pre-order the book from OUP or Amazon.com.