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 Ben Keppel
associate professor of history university of oklahoma |
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Research > work-in-progress > earlier research > other projects > publications > presentations |
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work-in-progress I am currently working on my second book, Children of Change: Poverty, Race and American Life, 1965-1980, which will examine the symbolic place of children in debates about race and poverty in post-World War II America. For an early discussion of this research, see my lead article, "Race, Poverty, and the Symbolism of the Child" in the Spring 1998 Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports. The article is in .pdf format (viewable with Adobe Acrobat Reader.) This project has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and awards from the University of Oklahoma's junior faculty research program and the office of the Vice-President for Research. Forthcoming in 2005 or 2006 from the University of Notre Dame Press is Black Scholars on the Line: Social Science and American Thought in the Twentieth Century, a collection of social science research produced by scholars working at historically black colleges in the years before and during the Civil Rights movement. I am co-editing this text with Professor Jonathan Scott Holloway of the African-American Studies program at Yale University, and we are both contributing contextualizing essays to introduce the primary source material. |
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earlier research My first book was The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth  B. Clark,
Lorraine Hansberry, and the
Cultural Politics of Race,
published by Harvard University Press in 1995. It examines the
dilemmas and difficulties faced by three key participant-symbols in the
postwar American discourse over race. In each case, these individuals had
to struggle to make certain that their accomplishments -- and the public
acclaim that came with those achievements -- were not simply
interpreted as valedictories to an allegedly "color-blind" American dream. For more info, see the page forThe Work of Democracy at Harvard University Press. |
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other projects I am also one of three contributors to a new edition of Toward a People's Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement, first published by E.P. Dutton in 1977, and republished in 1998 by the University of New Mexico Press. My essay introduces the book, which is an account of the role played by mural artists in the social movements of the sixties and seventies, a topic I encountered firsthand in 1993 while working at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California. For more information on the book, take a look at the SPARC webpage which features TAPA in their online bookstore. I was also pleased to be a consultant for William Greaves' PBS documentary on diplomat Ralph Bunche, Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey. You can see a bit of what I had to say by visiting the website page that discusses "The Man and the Myth: Whose Image?", which includes a video clip.
publications: recent and forthcoming "Philanthropy and Foundations," Civil Rights in the United States (New York: McMillan Library Reference, 2000), 598-99. "An Historian Reads Toward a People's
Art," in Eva Cockcroft, John Weber and "Lillian Smith and the Genealogy of American Racism, " One Hundred Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Boston, MA / January 2001 "Sesame Street and the Political Culture of the Great Society, " Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Mid-America American Studies Association, University of Iowa/April 1998 "Kenneth and Mamie Clark: Howard University and the Making of Two
Action-Intellectuals," Annual Meeting of the Association of
African-American Life and History (Philadelphia, PA)/ October 1995 |
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