2014 Summer Teacher Institutes

America in the 1960s

The institute in Houston (June 10–13), titled "America in the 1960s," will align with the state’s eleventh-grade U.S. history curriculum. Topics to be addressed include the Kennedy Administration, the Cold War, the Space Race, influential women of the period, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration, Republican politics, the protest movements of the 1960s, and the influence of the decade's music and writing.

Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon answer questions on the podium during the second in a series of debates between the two men. Frank McGee (center) of NBC News was moderator for this session. Washington, DC, October 7, 1960. United States Information Agency, UPI/WAP-100713.
James T. Patterson

Professor James T. Patterson (keynote speaker) is the Ford Foundation Professor of History emeritus at Brown University, where he taught from 1972 to 2002. He received an MA and PhD in history from Harvard University, after serving in the Army and working as a journalist. He began his academic career at Indiana University, where he taught from 1964 to 1972. His many honors include the Frederick Jackson Turner book prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the prestigious Bancroft Prize for American history for his book Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. Dr. Patterson is the author of many highly praised books on American history, the most recent of which is The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America, published in 2012.

James T. Patterson.

Terry Anderson

Terry Anderson is professor of history and Cornerstone Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M University. He has published five books, and co-authored one, A Flying Tiger's Diary, with pilot Charles R. Bond Jr. His PhD dissertation was published as The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944–47. A baby boomer who went from a boy, to a Vietnam vet, to a man during the tumultuous 1960s, he knew that he would have to write on that time and has published The Movement and the Sixties, focusing on social activism, and a survey entitled The Sixties. During the 1990s, he became interested in a public policy that was dividing the American public, and he penned The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action, and most recently, Bush's Wars, which concerns the younger Bush's War on Terror in Afghanistan and, especially, the conflict in Iraq. He has visited almost eighty countries, held three Fulbright professorships, and taught in Malaysia, Japan, China, Ireland, and Indonesia.

Terry Anderson.

Mary C. Brennan

Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Mary C. Brennan attended Edgecliff College of Xavier University for her undergraduate degree before moving on to receive a PhD from Miami University of Ohio in 1988. Her dissertation on the development of conservatism in modern America was a natural outgrowth of her interest in how politics affects "normal" people. Over the years, she has continued to investigate conservative politics in its various manifestations. Turning Right in the Sixties (UNC Press, 1995) evolved from her dissertation and examined the conservative "capture" of the GOP through the Goldwater campaign. Since then, she has focused on women's roles within conservatism in general and the anticommunist movement in particular. Her current book, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace (Colorado 2008), evolved from her curiosity about Joe McCarthy’s wife. Her most recent monograph, Pat Nixon: Embattled First Lady, was published by the University Press of Kansas in 2011, as part of their Modern First Ladies series. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s First Ladies: Influence and Image series and participated in numerous radio interviews about her subject. In 1990, Brennan joined the history faculty at Texas State University. In 2011, she became chair of the department of history.

Mary C. Brennan.

David Farber

David Farber is a professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the author or editor of fourteen books including Chicago '68, The Age of Great Dreams, The Sixties: From Memory to History, The Conservative Sixties, and The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s. His honors include a senior fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, an American Historical Association Congressional Fellowship, and a Fulbright Senior Lectureship. He has lectured widely on the American Sixties, including invited talks given in Tokyo, Melbourne, Jakarta, Beirut, Moscow, Hamburg, Utrecht, Cambridge, and Paris.

David Farber.

Mark Atwood Lawrence

Mark Atwood Lawrence, associate professor of history at The University of Texas at Austin, is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (2005), and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2008). He has also published articles and essays on various topics in Cold War history and is now at work on a study of U.S. policy making toward the Third World during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Mark Atwood Lawrence.

Allen Matusow

Allen Matusow is the academic affairs director at the Baker Institute and the William Gaines Twyman Professor of History at Rice University. He joined the Rice faculty in 1963 and served as the dean of humanities from 1981 to 1995. He specializes in twentieth-century U.S. history and has written or edited five books, including The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s and Nixon's Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes. Matusow is currently writing a book on Jimmy Carter and the Middle East.

Allen Matusow.

Alexis McCrossen

Alexis McCrossen is professor of history at Southern Methodist University, where she has been on the faculty since 1995, the same year she received her doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard University.  She is a cultural historian with research interests in the history of timekeeping, religion, technology, mass media, cities, and business.  Professor McCrossen is the author of Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Cornell University Press, 2000) and Marking Modern Times: Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2013), as well as of articles addressing religious, cultural, and technological aspects of timekeeping in the United States. She also edited and contributed to Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States-Mexico Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2009) and has continued to develop her research interests in the history of consumption, particularly among “inconspicuous consumers,” and of consumer culture more generally.  Presently, Professor McCrossen is working on a history of New Year’s observances in the United States since the eighteenth century, provisionally titled Resolutions and Revelry: New Year’s Observances in the United States.

Alexis McCrossen.

Linda Reed

Linda Reed is associate professor of history at the University of Houston and has completed a two-year tenure as director of graduate studies. She is a noted scholar in African American history, with a particular interest in women and the South. Her book manuscript on noted civil rights heroine Fannie Lou Hamer will be going to press within the next academic year (2014–2015). She also served nine years as the director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Houston. Between 2001 and 2003, Dr. Reed was the national director for the Association of Black Women Historians. She has received fellowships from the University of North Carolina, the University of Michigan, the Ford Foundation, and Princeton University. She received her PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Linda Reed.

Jeremi Suri

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Professor Suri is the author of five books on contemporary politics and foreign policy. In September 2011, he published a new book on the past and future of nation-building: Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama. Professor Suri's research and teaching have received numerous prizes. In 2007, Smithsonian Magazine named him one of America's "Top Young Innovators" in the arts and sciences. His writings appear widely in blogs and print media. Professor Suri is also a frequent public lecturer and guest on radio and television programs.

Jeremi Suri.

Matthew Tribbe

Matthew Tribbe, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, studies twentieth-century U.S. history, with a special emphasis on American culture in the 1960s and 1970s.  He grew up in Ohio, where he earned a BA from the University of Cincinnati. After a few years of working at an independent record store and the local phone company, he headed south to earn a PhD in history at The University of Texas at Austin.  Prior to moving to Connecticut, he taught at UT Austin and the University of Houston.  His first book, No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture, will be published by Oxford University Press this July.

Matthew Tribbe.

Randall B. Woods

Randall B. Woods is the John A. Cooper Professor of American History at the University of Arkansas. Among his books are Fulbright: A Biography (Cambridge, 1995), LBJ: architect of American Ambition (Simon and Schuster, 2006), and Shadow Warrior: William E. Colby and the CIA (Basic Books, 2013). He was a Mellon Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2011 and the John G. Winant Professor of American Politics at the University of Oxford in 2013. He is currently writing a history of the Great Society.

Randall B. Woods.

Nancy Beck Young

Nancy Beck Young is professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Houston. She is a historian of twentieth-century American political development. Her research questions how political institutions have shaped the lives of average people through public policy. Much of her work involves study of Congress, the presidency, and first ladies. Dr. Young is also interested in Texas political history, especially Texans in Washington. She has published the following books: Wright Patman: Populism, Liberalism, and the American Dream (2000); Lou Henry Hoover: Activist First Lady (2004); and Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World War II (2013).  She is revising a manuscript for Oxford University Press that looks at the early New Deal, and she is writing a book about the 1964 presidential election for the University Press of Kansas. She joined the faculty of the University of Houston in 2007 after teaching for ten years at McKendree College in Illinois.

Nancy Beck Young.