Nostalgia Trap

James Oakes was sitting at the head of a frighteningly tiny conference table when I entered the room for my first graduate course at the CUNY Graduate Center many years ago. A professor of American history, his intensely thoughtful approach to the discipline impressed and, of course, intimidated me. I've since come to know him as a serious and generous scholar, whose work on slavery and abolitionism serves, to me, as a great model for how politics and history can be effectively interwoven. In this conversation, we talk about his focus on slavery and the Civil War, his response to Lincoln's radical critics, and why he prefers to explore his politics, at least publicly, through the study of the 19th century. 

In recent months I have been depending on writer and professor Anthony Galluzzo's fantastic Facebook feed for his uniquely cynical take on the latest news, notes, and opinions--particularly when it comes to higher education, gentrification, militarized police, imperial foreign policy, and lots of other big issues facing the world today. I finally got to sit down with him, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, of all places, to hear about his weird experience with actor Jason Patric on the week of 9/11/01, his perception of the freakish nature of Los Angeles sunshine, and the sometimes enlightening, sometimes frustrating times he's spent teaching at colleges like West Point and CUNY.

I've known Joe and John Lombardo since the mid-1990s, when I met them while working at a restaurant called Marie Callender's in Ventura, California. As an alienated, nerdy teenager, I looked up to the Lombardo brothers as models of a different kind of man than the jocks and surfers I was surrounded by in high school. In hindsight, they were my first encounter with hipsterism, and they taught me a lot about being cool. In this conversation, they tell me about their own upbringing, how they came to punk music as a saving grace, encounters with Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and Richard Simmons, and why they think the alternative rock scene of the 1990s was the last great moment in American counterculture.    

Nichole Shippen is a political theorist and professor at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York. We talked a bit about her youth in a small rancher town in Wyoming, and how she navigated the particular cultural landscape of such a space. Our discussion focuses mainly on race, identity, and class structure in America, as we try to situate events in Ferguson, Missouri within a wider political and historical continuum. Her book Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom will be published this fall. 

David Zeiger's documentary film Sir! No Sir! had a profound impact on my graduate studies, educating me about the "GI movement" against the Vietnam War and kick-starting my project on the "GI coffeehouses" that functioned as the institutional support network for that important movement. We had a great conversation about his years growing up in Los Angeles, his need to "do something" about the war in Vietnam, his work with antiwar soldiers at a GI coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas (outside Fort Hood) in the early 1970s, and his development as a photographer and filmmaker. 

During my early years as a graduate student in history, I took a course at the CUNY Graduate Center called "From Civil Rights to Black Power," taught by Professor Clarence Taylor. The readings for the course, along with Professor Taylor's radical approach to American racial politics, completely rearranged my perceptions about race and American society, and helped set me on a path to becoming a radical historian myself. His most recent book, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (Columbia University Press, 2011), historicizes the complex interaction between the radical Left and the wider politics of education. In this conversation, he talks about his years in New York City's public high school system and his evolving views on liberalism, conservatism, and the direction of radical politics in the age of Obama.

Reading Todd Gitlin's book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage was a major moment in my development as a historian. Gitlin's colorful, rigorous description of that turbulent decade heavily influenced my decision to study postwar American politics when I began my graduate studies in 2004. I recently sat down in his office at Columbia University to talk about his experience as president of Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960s, his personal trajectory as an activist and academic, and his thoughts on Occupy Wall Street and the contemporary American political landscape. 

In 2004, when he was executive officer of the CUNY Graduate Center's department of history, Professor Joshua Freeman was my first contact and mentor in the early years of grad school. His expertise and generosity helped me and many others in our transition to a rigorous Ph.D. program. He is now a Distinguished Professor at the GC and teaches at CUNY's Queens College, sharing his deep knowledge of American politics, economics, and society with students throughout New York City. This conversation touches on his experiences growing up in Brooklyn, his early connection to the Civil Rights Movement, the motivation behind his recent book American Empire, and his development as one of the nation's prominent scholars of American labor.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, writer, critic, translator, archivist, and much more. As a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, he is known as much for his scholarship as for his generosity: with his time, with his attention to student's work, and with his talents as editor and writer. Ammiel recently visited my apartment for a conversation about his youth in Boston growing up around poet and writer Charles Olson, his activism during the Vietnam years, and the path that led him to become a scholar of the Middle East. 

My friend Justin Rogers-Cooper, a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York, recently invited me to campus to record a "live" podcast with his students. The course was designed to help students consider, and prepare for possible participation in, the profession of teaching. Talking to bright young undergraduates about the "nuts and bolts" of pedagogy was a fascinating experience that offers a unique perspective on what 21st century college students value both in and out of the classroom. The range of backgrounds and experiences presented in this series of clips captures some of what I value most about CUNY itself: an engaged, diverse student body with deep insights into the world around them.