Scholar of the Month

The Vietnam War is the focus of Saturday's lecture by Professor Laura McEnaney of Whittier College. Here is her note to you:

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Hello teachers!

I am really looking forward to our session on the domestic politics of the Vietnam era. This is a complex moment in our nation’s history, crowded with views and voices about the path our country should take in terms of both foreign and domestic policy. What I hope to offer you are some different ways to think about “the sixties,” a decade often misunderstood in our popular narratives. In fact, this decade witnesses the (re)emergence of radical, liberal, and conservative social movements, all with a set of pointed critiques about America’s direction, and all with a particular vision and agenda for social change. We will focus on the antiwar movements, which included Vietnam veterans themselves, and we will explore the rise of a populist conservative movement that took root right here in Southern California. Although we will not talk about the Vietnam War, specifically, we will explore how it loomed over every domestic political issue of the era.


Laura McEnaney

Professor of History

Whittier College
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Josh Kun is a professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism where he also directs The Popular Music Project of The Norman Lear Center. He is the author or editor of several books, including Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (2005) and Songs in the Key of Los Angeles: Sheet Music and the Making of Southern California (2013), a collaboration with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles out in May. As a curator, his music installations and exhibitions have appeared in venues such as The Skirball Cultural Center, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the Museum of Latin American Art. He curated the 2012 Pacific Standard Time exhibition "Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles 1945-75" at the Grammy Museum, and designed the music for the Autry National Center exhibition on the history of Jews in Los Angeles, which opens later this year. He is currently the resident "Collector of Ideas" at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Exhibiting Watergate: Why was it so hard for the federal government to install an exhibit on Watergate at the Nixon Library? And what does this mean for the state of public history in America?

Established by the Nixon Foundation in 1990, the Nixon Library and Birthplace was a private facility with a museum and a small archive. A law enacted by President Gerald Ford in 1974 had prohibited former President Richard Nixon from having any control over his presidential papers and Congress also decried that they could not be moved from the Washington, DC region. In the early 2000s, the Nixon Foundation lobbied Congress to remove that restriction, which it did in 2004. The papers, however, were to remain under the control of the National Archives, which would also take control of the private library's museum and archival facility. Congress also earmarked nearly 10 million dollars to built a state-of-the-art repository for the estimated 42 million page-presidential collection next to the old library. The entire facility would be renamed to reflect its new status. On July 11, 2007, it became the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

The museum included a controversial Watergate gallery, written by a Nixon aide Robert Bostock and approved by President Nixon himself. As part of the deal to make the transfer to the federal government happen that exhibit had to be changed. In the end, I was asked to do it as part of my duties as the Nixon Presidential Library's first director.

All modern presidential libraries are administered by the National Archives. This module will be about who exercises real control and the implications for educators and the general public. The creation of the Watergate gallery tested that issue. The ensuing controversy ultimately involved Congress, The New York Times, the Nixon family and other presidential families, and President Barack Obama's choice for Archivist of the United States. In the end, the public won, but only just.

Dr. Adam Golub is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. His research interests include popular culture, the history of education and childhood, and the globalization of American culture. Among the courses he teaches at Cal State Fullerton are “Adolescent America,” “Childhood and Family in American Culture,” “The Cold War and American Culture,” and “American Popular Culture and the World.” His writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Film and History, and Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. He recently published an article on the global reception of the film The Blackboard Jungle in Red Feather: An International Journal of Children’s Visual Culture. Dr. Golub has a Ph.D. in American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin, an M.A.T. in English from Boston College, and a B.A. in English from Vassar College. Before coming to Cal State, he taught in the Education Studies Department at Guilford College in North Carolina, where he worked with pre-service English and Social Studies teachers. From 1992 to 1997, he taught high school English in Massachusetts and

TAH teachers spent the day listening to Professor Lon Kurashige. He explained the impact of the Japanese Internment in California. In the afternoon, our teachers toured the gallery which were led by knowledgeable docents.

USC History Professor Lon Kurashige who talked about the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII:

Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC

Author of award-winning book: JAPANESE AMERICAN CELEBRATION AND CONFLICT. This is a study of the historical formation of what is commonly known as "ethnic identity."

Co-editor of MAJOR PROBLEMS IN ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY, a college-level textbook.
Currently writing a new college-level US history textbook AND a monograph on the history of the Yellow Peril in America.

Dr. Josh Sides is the Whitsett Chair of California History and the Director of the Center for Southern California Studies at California State University, Northridge. He is the author of the books LA City Limits and Erotic City, and editor of the recently-released anthology Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles (Huntington/University of California Press, 2012.

Dr. Sides website has Saturday's information:http://www.joshsides.com/

Karin Huebner received her Ph.D. in history from USC in 2009, her M.A. in history from USC, and her B.A. in history from UCLA in 1985. Her fields of specialization are Native American history, with special emphasis on the Indian experience from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, as well as the history of the Indian reform movement; the history of the American West; and the history of Gender and Sexuality in the United States. One chapter of her dissertation appeared in revised form as “An Unexpected Alliance: Stella Atwood and the California Clubwomen, John Collier, and the Indians of the Southwest, 1917-1934” in the Pacific Historical Review (August, 2009). For this article, Dr. Huebner received the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize for the most outstanding essay by a graduate student. Dr. Huebner is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Native American History, edited by Peter C. Mancall. Dr. Huebner is currently revising her dissertation, “Remembrance and Reform: A Multi-Generational Saga of a Euro-American-Indian Family, 1739-1924 into a book manuscript.
In 2012, Dr. Huebner received the USC Remarkable Woman Award, a campus-wide recognition for achievments in scholarship, contributions to USC, commitment to students and women’s issues, community involvement, and professional excellence. As a graduate student, she received USC’s University Excellence in Teaching Award. Dr. Huebner currently serves as the Director of Programs for the USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, astudent/faculty institute devoted to interdisciplinary study.

Prior to her career as a historian, Dr. Huebner competed on the Women’s World Tennis Tour and in the US Open, French Open, and Wimbledon. She also captained the UCLA women’s tennis team to its first national championship in 1981.

Topic: The Impact of the Cold War in America

Dr. Schrank explored the major cultural and social trends of a notorious decade marked by strategies of containment, a culture of consumption, an expanded middle-class, and a newly defined youth generation. Much of the historical literature produced in the 1970s, and 1980s tended to characterize the fifties as a “culture of conformity.” This was a historiographical response to the repressive nature of Cold War domestic policy and the reification of traditional gender norms as depicted in advertising and television, a new cultural medium. While patterns of suburbanization and racial segregation did inequitably divide many American cities, and promote the consolidation of what historian Lizabeth Cohen has called a “consumer’s republic,” many 1950s scholars have subsequently argued that there was much more going on under the surface than we might realize. Historians in the past ten years have thus returned to the 1950s to reexamine the complex sexual, racial, and cultural meanings of rock and roll, Beat art and poetry, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, among many other icons and cultural phenomena of the era.

Prof. Mark Wild from Cal State, LA discussed the impact of the Great Depression in American.